What an Interesting Place

This is a "real" place. It exists. You can Google Passage Thru Time Museum, and you will find that it is operated by the Potosi Township Historical Society in Linn, Kansas. Here's what they say about the place: Experience the rich heritage of the Potosi Township area, with emphasis on mining, farming, the historic Potosi Brewery and the Mississippi River. Other displays include arrowheads, World War II memorabilia, former businesses and John Deere toy tractors. The museum also houses an extensive collection of photos and historic records.



We've been together, now, some eight years. Just over six of those years, we've lived together, sharing all the ups and downs that come with day-to-day being in the same place. I've been thinking that there is something very powerful about the passage of time within a relationship, and even more powerful, there is something about what happens when people dedicate long stretches of time to living within relationship with each other. Things accumulate in our "museums" with the passage of time, and that accumulation documents the living, organic nature of how love grows.



I look back to the beginnings of our relationship, and we would surely have said we were very much in love -- we DID say that. We believed it. It was true. That love was fiery, and breathless, and awesome. It was also, for the very large part, untried and untested. We came together with energy and passion and boundless desire. We were full of hope and great hubris. We knew that ours was a love destined to be forever and always.



Of course, even we couldn't stop or change the passage of time. We're older now. I am nearing the middle of my 50's, and He will be 60 in the spring of next year. We've traveled through the last eight years, and we've experienced all manner of experiences -- some joyful, and others quite difficult. We've held on to one another through all kinds of adventures. We've begun to acquire quite the collection of memories and artifacts of the time we've spent doing this together.



That blazingly bright love that brought us together endures and the fires burn with an intensity that is somehow deeper and more compelling than even that which drove the first part of our connection. Which is not to say that there have not been changes. There have. The purely sexual energy that was so much a factor in the beginning, is quieter. Neither of us has the same libido we once did. That is a simple (if regrettable) fact. We've lived through enough years to learn, what we always (sort of) knew, that love really does not equal sex. We have come to the point of knowing that we can enjoy our sexuality as it fits into our lives and our rhythms, and not be obsessive about what and how often and when.



We've learned that it is simply good to be together -- really a great joy to be able to touch, stroke, snuggle. We've come to enjoy those times when we find ourselves all wrapped up in one another, murmuring away about this or that -- without any agenda or "destination" in mind.



We've learned to value the life we've made. We've learned to count those good friends that we've made as the treasure that they are. We've learned to understand the value of the work we each do -- to be gratified by what is good about that, without the sense of striving to make a career. We've launched the children we reared. For good or bad, they are the people that they will be. There isn't a one of them that we're not crazy in love with. We've learned not to hold the past too tightly, or to squint too intently into the unknowable future.

There are times when, being human, we are disappointed in the realities of our NOW. We can fall into wishing that we had more time, more physical vitality, more money, more "friends," more energy, more options -- more years ahead. Still, wandering through our own "Passage of Time Museum," I think it has become a rather remarkable, and joy-filled, place that has been built out of the fabric of our days, and weeks, and years together. I hope that, for the others of you that have shared the journey to this point with us, the same might be true for each of you.

swan