When your husband of two weeks takes you home for the first time it's bound to be an adventure of revelations, and a journey of discoveries that further melts your hearts together into one.
This is the story of Jacob's closet.
This past summer we took a long and windy trip on a very large ferry home to Jacob's Newfoundland. His mother and father were ready and waiting for me with open arms, photo albums and the memories of his first twenty six years on the rock, before I knew him. He was already well versed in the history of Bridget, as we know her, because my parents and friends have had years to subject Jacob to my past whenever we all were together. Jacob moved to Halifax to attend graduate school and that's where I grew up. He's been privy to odd things like my figure skating badges and camping photos of chubby little Bridget in dirty swimsuits when she was six years old for an embarrassing amount of time.
So it was time for him to fill in the blanks, the places marked for completion in our new book of memories, the one we started writing when our lives intersected for good, never to separate ever again.
I wanted to see his room first. Why? I don't know. I guess because it would have represented the nucleus of Jacob's whole being. The bulk of his time was spent there. He grew there, changed there, and wished and hoped there. His faith was planted there. He became the man he is now there.
On the very top floor of the Reilly house is the room where Jake grew up. A white painted door at the top of the stairs leads in to a small bedroom with a wide wooden plank floor and baby blue walls, crowded by steep eaves that require you to stand in the centre of the room so that you don't bump your head. The only thing on the walls are bookshelves, a cork board over the desk and a painting of a boat, his father's boat, that he painted in junior high school.
The bookshelves were atypical for a young adult male. Classics. Homer. Melville. Stevenson. Hemingway. Three bibles. Tattered Hardy Boys tucked in amongst never-opened Star Wars comics. National Geographic in stacks. A microscope. A homemade sock monkey that might be as old as Jacob, later confirmed to be his favorite toy from toddlerhood. Records. Dozens of records. Zeppelin, Floyd, Rush, Eagles, Doors, Lightfoot, Beatles.
On the corkboard were pinned now-faded pictures from the early nineties-Jacob and his younger sister Erin at a wedding, Jacob hauling traps, Jacob and three of his high school friends with his once rustbucket truck, before he and his father restored it. Stubs to an Aerosmith concert in Halifax. A tiny floating buoy keychain with his very own boat keys, because his father trusted him with the true family vehicle.
It's a very small room. Tiny considering Jacob had reached his full six foot four status just before high school started. The only furniture is a double captain's bed and a small plain wooden desk with a plain wooden chair. I was told Jacob helped his father make the furniture when he was around nine years old, in his dad's workshop, which is part of the garage.
On the bed was a mariner's star quilt made by his grandmother in shades of yellow and blues and green. On the floor, a braided blue rug, because the floors are so cold in that house. A lamp on the desk cast a soft warm light so that he could read and study and dream.
From the window he has a view I might pay for, nothing but blue water and a bit of the cliffs across the bay. The wind beats a constant presence on the ripply-glassed, chipped paint window frame. If you stand there too long you get cold. There's a constant draft. Jacob never minded, he likes a cold room to sleep in.
There is a smaller door in the wall beside the closet and for a brief moment I thought maybe he was one of those really lucky kids who had their own bathroom off their bedroom growing up. Instead it was another ice cold spot, this time leading up seven wooden painted stairs to another door. An outside wooden door which leads to the widow's walk which is perched on top of their white-painted house like a steeple and his mother told me she always found him up there and he was never in his room much at all. She said growing up it was his favorite place in the world.
The biggest discovery for me wasn't that he had a secret hideaway. No, my favorite revelations came from his closet. His folks never asked him to take the rest of his things, or made any plans to take over his space, it's just there, as he left it. His, to come and go if he pleases, taking something if he needs it, leaving things behind that he doesn't need for a bit. That surprised me, because my old bedroom was transformed into an office for my mom within a few weeks of my leaving home, and my sister Bailey's room is an upstairs library.
That night as we got ready for sleep after a day spent soaking up sunshine and wind, I asked him about all the girls he may have loved in that bed, and he smiled and said there may have been one or two or possibly three even. I could almost imagine him from his teenage and young adult pictures, with a girl, wrestling under the sheets, skin exposed, feelings on the line, lustful wishes granted in secret with his parents sleeping obliviously in their own bed two floors below, or maybe even away for a few nights. He said he felt like a teenager again when he took me in that bed and it was the quietest, warmest love we had ever made thus far. Then when he stretched out full length beside me he confided in whispers that there had been only one girl ever in his bed and that it was me but that I shouldn't think his father's boat wasn't a much more secretive place in which to take his girlfriends. And I was thrilled to know I'm not the only heartbreaker in our universe because Jacob spent his high school years breaking hearts and crushing spirits all over the place by falling in love and then right back out again, not sure what he wanted out of life quite yet. Half the town's adolescent female population was a bird in his hand at one point. His own memories are fond, but he was searching for meaning as far back as we could see.
Part of me had actually feared he might have grown up in a room completely devoid of creature comforts, reading a bible and possibly committing himself to a life of deprivation in God's name. He laughed and said if I looked very very hard in that closet I'd find a glass bong and a case of empty screech bottles. He said he spent years cultivating his world famous inability to consume anything logic-altering, except for me, of course.
And I did. The next morning I found everything he talked about in that closet. I also found a notebook that constituted one of his first journals. All this hidden up on the top shelf above a rod sagging in the middle with the weight of warm wool sweaters and flannel shirts and a heck of a lot of plaid in that flannel. Thermals by the dozen. Corduroy! An ancient jean jacket. A few early editions of his infamous moss green blazer. A funeral suit. Two rugby team shirts. His University frosh shirt. Hip waders. Hockey gear that would no longer fit him now with such muscular arms and thighs. A couple of pairs of 'good' shoes. Trophies. A toolbox. A record player on a pull-out shelf. A silver peace symbol on a leather cord hanging in with his belts. Everything smelled like salt and Old Spice and cedar.
When you love someone so deeply, returning to their childhood with them is a gift, a confirmation of your uncertain reasonings on how they became the person you know. I got to see that my husband did indeed grow up in a drafty, fiercely loving farmhouse perched on a windy cliff by the sea and that he was indeed a minimalist and a dreamer and he found God and loved and lost and won and cried and laughed too. He picked tomatoes from the garden for his mother and helped his father fix engines and he spent his free time hauling lobster traps and sailing and he lounged on beaches and wrote poetry and listened to music and he drank sometimes and he was grounded from taking the boat out for leisure trips and he tried to trip his sister on the back stairs every single morning and he drank all the milk back then too, just like he does now.
It was such predictable treasure I found there, in his room, that made me love him even more.
But mostly it was the book from the top shelf of his closet. An entry dated Thursday, June 22, 1989.
I'm told that today is the first day of the rest of my life. Yesterday I graduated from high school and since then everyone has been asking me what I want to do with my life. I answer flippantly and Dad is not impressed. I say fame and fortune. Dad wants me to be humble, do a hard day's work and keep an honest living. I'm starting university in a few months and I don't have a plan quite yet, though I might go for my teaching degree. Maybe history or psychology. Right at this point the only thing I know is that I want to stay near the sea, have a good job that I love, a pretty wife that I love and hopefully a boy and a girl. I'd like to keep driving my truck if it still works and I'd like to keep the same friends even though most of them are going to away to school. No one wants to stay here and I might not. I'd like to see the planet before I settle down, I'd like to see what the girls are like that I haven't met before. I'd like to get better at guitar and maybe learn to cook. That's more than I can fit into a day, so maybe they mean to say this is the first year of the rest of my life. That would be better.
