I can’t let it go without mentioning that it was ten years ago today that I broke up with Marty (see Ten years ago part 1 and Ten years ago part 2). It felt like the worst day of my life at the time it happened. It’s easy to say now that it was really the best thing.

1998 was a very hard year for me. A couple of years earlier, I’d bought a four-bedroom house in my own name and moved my boyfriend and his two teenaged sons in with me. Then they all moved out toward the end of 1997 and I had to pay the mortgage by myself at the same time that I had taken a cut in pay to take a new and more promising job at the library where I now work. For most of 1998, I struggled financially, and I also struggled to keep my relationship with Marty together, despite his moving out.

On August 5, 1998, we had just returned from our third session of couples counseling. It had not gone well for Marty. Basically, the therapist, after hearing both our stories, turned to Marty and told him that he was wrong. As gratifying as I found this, I was by then savvy enough to know that this did not bode well for our future. After the session, Marty and I sat out on the patio in the backyard and discussed it. I don’t remember a lot about our conversation, except the moment when he turned to me and said, “I’m still mad at you for buying this house.”

That was the statement that made me stop my futile efforts to save the relationship, which had been an enormous drain on my emotional and physical resources. With everything I had sacrificed and compromised in the service of preserving it, it was finally clear that it was no damn use. He was stuck on the petty view that, as he put it, “a marriage won’t work unless someone is in charge, and if I get married, it’s going to have to be me.” I told him it was over, and he could take all of his stuff, including the radial arm saw in the basement, out of the house he resented me owning, and keep it all somewhere else. I didn’t care where.

If he saw me now, married to Bob, who is so much his opposite, I’m sure he wouldn’t know what to make of it. It was beyond his comprehension to think of a relationship where people are equals, and position isn’t determined by gender or (mis)interpretations of the Bible. (How DID I end up with this guy, anyway?) He’ll ever know what my life is like now; he died suddenly of a massive heart attack in early 2004, the same year in which I later met Bob.

Dang! That’s a hell of a way to end a post. Even though I am now happy in my marriage to Bob, there seems to be some processing I still need to do with the emotional remnants of my experience with Marty. Sometime soon, I want to post stories from the trip I took to Colorado with Marty to visit his extended family to tell them about how his stepfather abused him from the age of about three. How’s that for a cliffhanger?

Last night, Bob and I woke up to a sound we couldn’t quite identify, not quite a dog barking, not quite a cat yowling. It was more like a raspy howl. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window to see a fox in my driveway, howling over and over. He was there for a few minutes, and then he got up and ran into the street, running down toward the ponds, still howling.

It still amazes me how much wildlife we have all around us, even though we are in a suburb of Washington, D.C. We are just about a mile due north of the Maryland/District of Columbia line, between the Capitol Beltway and downtown Wheaton.

Today, Bob and I took a walk down the street, right where the fox was probably headed last night. There is a network of man-made ponds to capture the storm water from Wheaton. There’s little green space in Wheaton, and the rain that comes down on all the impervious surfaces (parking lots, roads, etc.) has to go somewhere. The water eventually drains to Sligo Creek via little creeks that run through the neighborhoods. Whenever there is a major shower in the area, the potential for erosion of these creek beds is significant, which is why the ponds were built. They hold all that water, and send a controlled amount of water to the creek downstream.

A side benefit to this is that lots of species of wildlife are attracted to this area. Here’s what we saw today:

We didn’t see another fox, but we saw a pair of deer at the edge of one of the ponds.

Dozens of Canada geese; one pair had a gaggle of five goslings.

Several wood ducks: two females with clutches of chicks numbering seven and eight each, and one male. The males have fantastic coloring. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Wood_Duck.html

Two black-crowned night-herons. http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Black-crowned_Night-Heron.html

A green heron.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Green_Heron.html

One female belted kingfisher.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Belted_Kingfisher.html

One killdeer.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Killdeer.html

A couple of small turtles and one large one, possibly a snapping turtle.

Tree swallows, song sparrows, robins, grackles, a phoebe, a mallard duck, and a red-winged blackbird. We saw a baby robin that seemed to have just mastered flying, and a baby grackle that was on the ground but didn’t look like it knew how, yet.

Six tiger swallowtails clustered together in the mud, extracting minerals and nutrients from the soil.

A school of about thirty brown bullhead fish.

When I was shopping for a house twelve years ago, I found the ponds down the street. I saw my first night-heron there. It just about sold me on the place right then. Even from inside my house, I can see all kinds of wildlife, because there is an open field across the street. Behind that is a patch of woods, and behind the woods and to the right are the ponds.

I’ve never been such a fanatical birder that I keep a life list, but I do have a couch list. Follow this link to a piece I wrote about it on Julie’s Tacky Treasures: http://www.tackytreasures.com/tackyhtml/couch-list.html. I accumulated thirty three species on this list before I stopped. It’s unlikely that I’ll add any more to the list because I moved the bird feeder from the front yard where I could see it from the couch, to the back.  But if I do, that page is where I’ll report it.