I became a rancher’s wife, I became a writer, I lived a life in nature. I lived under the stars — seeing the stars every single night as you can’t see them in the city. I was out in all kinds of weather, heavily bundled in winter, my breath streaming out white in front of me, the sky so brilliant and the snow even brighter so that it hurt my eyes to look, made them run with water. More than once we found ourselves in situations, never entirely by chance, where only Peter’s strength and knowledge kept us alive.
Once when we were driving to the ranch from the hay farm, we finally could go no farther because of four-foot, wind-hardened snowbanks across the road. Peter (as women would say, being a man) kept plowing forward, believing, I can only guess, that it would get better at the higher reaches where the road would be windswept clean. Instead, we became thoroughly stuck in this heavy, crusted snow. It was about thirty below Fahrenheit (about –34˚C), and miles to the nearest occupied dwelling. Usually, when we became stuck in snow, on Peter’s instructions, I just waited in the cab, or kicked at the crusted snow the tires were embedded in while Peter shovelled for the few necessary moments. This time, though, mid-afternoon on a frozen winter Sunday, with a vast, hard, cloudless pale sky above us, no traffic, and miles from an open road, in any event, I realized the seriousness of our situation right away. I had only to look at Peter’s determination as he reached into the truck box and pulled out a second shovel, and I started moving snow too.
I did so eagerly, with a kind of shared purpose, because I understood how close we were to freezing to death. All my life, although winter had always been something to fear in the West, I had protected myself from risky situations. I had been raised with such caution, taught to be always careful because I was a girl, and a small, inexperienced one. As a child I had dared nothing, because I thought the world belonged to others, never to me. Now I was finding the side of myself I had never known. I was finding strengths I’d been unaware of. That instant of fear when I realized our dire situation passed at once into a kind of inarticulate joy that even now I marvel at.
The bitter winters were followed by sweltering summers. In summer heat, carrying out coffee or lemonade in hundred-plus-degree temperatures (104˚F is 40˚C) and sitting with Peter in the cleared patch of cut alfalfa while insects buzzed around and there was no other sound except maybe the faint drone of a neighbour’s swather a mile or more away, I inhaled the delicious fragrance of the hay, both cut and standing, filling my nostrils while little ground-nesting birds flittered cheerily and swooped around us. I remember those endless summer days when the sun was up by five and darkness didn’t come until ten at night, and it seemed, somehow, that the sun didn’t ever fully set, that the sky glowed faintly all through the short northern night. The nights were magical and if for some reason you rose in the dark, you just held your breath for the beauty of it.
Am I imagining the pleasure of that world? The wonder? The ecstasy, even? I do not think so; my heart cracks for what I have lost, even given the travails that I also struggled with there.
Peter and I often rode together in the early years, he giving me advice about how to ride a horse, what to do and what not to do, but more often I had to draw it out of him, because he belonged to what I privately thought was an idiotic school of thought which was that if you do it wrong long enough, you’ll eventually figure out the right way yourself. How much time did he think I had? I was already thirty-six and not exactly in love with horses or riding, or with chasing cows. Yet in those days we never went out merely to ride; every single trip out from the corral was to do a job: to pick up a sick cow or calf and move it or them back to the corrals for doctoring or a trip to the vet, to move the bulls to where the cows were, to move cattle from one field to another, to separate the steers and bring them in, or to fix fence (although then we usually went in the old truck that served for fencing only and that rarely went on a road anymore). Riding for pleasure didn’t exist. Even when we had visitors who wanted to ride, Peter would make good use of them, and sometimes, because they were actually working whether they knew it or not, they got more riding than they’d bargained for.
And yet, one of my proudest moments as a wife came when one day we were riding side by side, heading back to the barn, and our horses were being driven mad by horseflies and mosquitoes, so much so that mine was doing something the cowboys called “crow-hopping,” that is, jumping on all fours. (He was also swinging his head and twisting just a bit, although hardly to the degree of rodeo saddle-bronc twisting.) He couldn’t be stopped from this behaviour, which was why we were heading back — to spray them with horse insect repellent — and I, in order to stay on the horse, was laughing and standing and swinging in my stirrups. Peter glanced over at me and, seeing this, beamed in surprise and pleasure and said, “Now you’re riding!”
It could not be said of me that when it came to riding horses I was a natural.
Nonetheless, I got so that I enjoyed riding most of the time, although sometimes I got too tired, and still I had to sit on that horse and keep going. Sometimes I found myself wondering if I had failed to understand something about the contract Peter and I had made. Was I to be a hired hand, and one who, because of my inexperience, always took the last place if anybody more experienced came along? More than once I pointed out to him that at least our hired man got paid. When I told people that even the cattle dog had higher rank than I did, they thought I was joking. But any rancher will tell you how invaluable a well-trained, smart cattle dog is. I could only pity a wife who was that loyal. But although I sometimes fumed and sometimes complained out loud and wondered what I’d spent all those years at university for, if this was how I was going to spend my life, I was so stimulated by what I was seeing, and so thrilled that, for the first time since I was a child, I had free time to spend on my own, I just did what was asked of me. And of course I held rank in the house and made a special effort to become a good cook, something during my first marriage I had never had time to concentrate on and had always wanted to achieve. Often, when Sean became old enough to drive and was on his way to the ranch for a long weekend, I would knock myself out in the kitchen, sometimes cooking a turkey with stuffing and all the other dishes usually reserved for Christmas dinners, just so he would know how much he was loved, how very happy I was to see him.
My pleasures with Peter were simple and invariably involved the land around us. When he had time off, or wanted to celebrate my birthday, for instance, he would take me on his motorcycle into a field I wanted to see with him — not by myself — where we could sit on rocks and study the flora and the fauna and talk about the sky, or the deer in the coulee behind us, or where we just sat in silence and gazed around in quiet pleasure. Or else we would get in the truck and he would drive us to some far-distant, seldom-travelled road nobody else was on where we could drive slowly and take in the countryside in an especially beautiful part of the country. Or we would go cross-country on trails he had learned about as a boy trailing cattle to the railway or to a sale ring with his father that were far from any highway or even a ranch yard. He knew that I liked nothing better than to be out in the landscape, going slowly or not moving at all, just looking at it, trying to get the feel of it, with nothing required of me but to look and look and look, to smell the air and the many scents always riding on it, to feel it on my skin. The same was true of him, and of who knows how many other ranching men who would keep this love well hidden from others. Over the years we drove everywhere, to distant landmarks, or to towns via narrow dirt back roads you wouldn’t go near if they were wet, or in winter when they would be buried under snow and ice. Every one of these forays was material for my writing, not just because I became more familiar with the landscape in which I lived, but also because there was so much opportunity to notice details about the animals who lived there and about the trees, plants, and the general lay of the land, all of which I needed to know to be able to write authentically.
One of our favourite drives, although we didn’t do it very often, was to aim for Medicine Hat, Alberta, but to go west and then north to Cypress Hills Park on the Saskatchewan side, drive through the park, steadily climbing, and at the top of the hills, keep on heading west past the far park boundary, onto ranchers’ land on trails that were marked with the sign IMPASSABLE WHEN WET and which were taken very seriously by even the most local of the local men (gumbo again, and not a speck of gravel). We would pass historic Fort Walsh, nestled in its beautiful green valley with the forest behind and the creek running by that in spring might be a roaring cataract, take the road above it that continued west across the high yellow prairie, drop down into a deep, long, partially treed valley, and move on slowly through grassy ranchland, and finally into Cypress Hills Park on the Alberta side, go through the resort village of Elkwater, drive north on a paved road until, finally, a couple of hours after we’d first driven into the park, we would meet the Trans-Canada Highway and head east again into Medicine Hat. It took a lot longer to go that way, but when we did it, the pleasure of it always seemed to us to be well worth the extra time.
We didn’t talk much on these drives, Peter not being a loquacious person at the best of times, and I was silenced by the beauty we were driving through. Sometimes Peter would tell me a story about the people who had once owned the land we were passing by, or remark on the condition of the fields and corrals. As it might from any rural man, new farm machinery always brought a comment too. But when I think back on our years of driving together, I don’t really remember a single conversation. We travelled comfortably side by side, each lost in our own thoughts, our eyes turned to the landscape outside the truck windows, and at such moments I believe we were thinking much the same thoughts. Chiefly, though, the emotion we shared was sheer, deep-seated pleasure.
Peter and I never quarrelled, chiefly because Peter couldn’t stand quarrelling, would leave the house, saddle his horse, and ride through the fields until he figured the quarrel had dissipated — not resolved, never resolved. I wanted to talk everything through, but what that in practice meant was that I talked and he mostly didn’t listen, although pretending to, and didn’t reply. You can well imagine that by the end of our first year together I gave up completely the urban-academic method of resolving differences as a waste of my time. If I wanted to get my own way about this or that, I was going to have to be a lot cagier about it. But Peter was no dummy, and being cagier often didn’t work either.
We had our difficulties, but they seem unimportant now: his belief in his ability to read the character of others, which I privately thought was abysmal; my increasing intolerance for the less charming of local practices, to which he was required to continue to pay homage, despite his knowing better. Sometimes I lost patience; I grew angry; I refused to participate. Sometimes he buried himself in his work. But don’t all couples find ways to overcome the inevitable frictions? I retreated into nature, and he wandered off to do whatever it was he did when I wasn’t around. In any event, it was a community where men and women for the most part kept their roles separate. But I was also becoming a writer, for which a certain distance was necessary. I often wonder if my increasing role as an observer set me apart from other people.
As Peter aged, though he never made more than a brief mention of his concerns to me, he began to think about what would become of his ranch. (The hay farm wasn’t at issue: We had come a long way since the 1886 striking down of Western women’s dower rights that left abandoned farm wives penniless and helpless. Now, should Peter die first, my rights to the hay farm were legally assured.) He had no direct heir; despite all the time Sean spent with us, and his ability to ride horses and understand the basics about cattle and the land, he had no desire to become a rancher. And Peter silently harboured a different, bigger dream. He was afraid that if he simply put the land up for sale it would be sold off piecemeal, as few people could have afforded to buy the whole place outright, most of which was Crown land anyway — that is, land belonging to the government of Saskatchewan and leased to the Butala family for an extended period, with the lease renewed periodically until in nearly everyone’s eyes it was Butala land. He had managed the ranch so that the grass was in excellent condition, and such was the nature of his heart that he couldn’t bear to see the place destroyed as one grassy whole, not to mention that a good part of its value for conservation purposes was the fact that it was such a large intact area.
He wanted to find a conservation organization that would buy the ranch and acquire, along with the native prairie that he owned, the lease as well, so that the whole miraculous place could be kept in one piece. Together, that is what we set out to do, and as I always point out to people, it was Peter’s initiative. If I had wanted to do this and he hadn’t, it would never have happened, despite my name on the deeds; with my name on the deeds and my dower rights he could not do it without my assent. But I was with him 100 percent right from the moment he declared this to be his desire. His parents were dead by then, and his sisters did not object, were even, I think, rather proud of him, and in the end, pleased with his innovative and creative decision. Suffice it to say that this took a long time, several years, to become fact, and the organization in question was the Nature Conservancy of Canada, who in 1996 became the owners of both the deeded land we donated to them and the remainder that they purchased, along with control of the government lease.
It was heartbreaking to both of us to have to give up the place, I am sure much more to Peter than to me, but he was never one to show his feelings if he could help it. He was caught up in the excitement (and the drudgery of the endless legal work) of being the first to do such a thing in the Province of Saskatchewan — that is, with an area of such size — and in the many meetings he had to attend, and the applause he received, even though most of his neighbours were aggrieved. They had wanted access to his lease and/or to buy his deeded property on his retirement; worse, he had brought the much-dreaded environmentalists right into the neighbourhood.
Nowadays, when all I see of the ranch is good photographs online, I can’t look too hard or for too long, because it hurts too much. The beauty of the place takes away everyone’s breath: the long, seemingly endless acres of slowly rolling, grass-covered hills, and the way the grass captures the light, at sunset turning rose and pink, at dawn turning to gold, often during the day dissolving into hazy aqua or green outlines against the horizon; miles of grass, backed by layers and different shades of blue-green and tan, pale yellow or sage, into the distant sky. Standing on one of the high hills, you can feel as if you have reached the top of the world. This endless Eden is too much for a single person to encompass. It renders everyone who cares about nature speechless. No wonder Peter had his heart — no, every cell of his body — set on saving it for others, for future generations. No wonder any objections had zero effect on him. He was in the grip of a vision.
The people who worked for the Nature Conservancy of Canada as well as their board members, as far as I could tell, fell in love with the place too, and put their considerable brains and vast expertise to work to enact the vision Peter had. We all agreed that in time the true plains buffalo should be brought back home to again inhabit the land they had come from. In the early 2000s, a herd of twenty-five males and twenty-five females was donated from Elk Island National Park in northeast Alberta. They were the descendants of the last remnants of the original herds of the plains, at peak as many as 60 million in number, rescued by a couple of Montana ranchers and purchased by the Canadian government about a hundred years before our project. They were the real thing, their biological name being Bison bison bison — genus, species, subspecies (the only other subspecies is wood bison). In later years, Peter used to drive out to the ranch by himself and sit in his unobtrusively parked truck, and watch them for hours as they went about their wild business. He would come back to the hay farm and tell me excitedly all about their habits, the way they moved and slept and generally behaved, and how this was different from the habits of cattle he knew so well.
All of us — the nature conservancy and its experts, Peter and I, and the major donors to the project — wanted to preserve the native prairie, and so it was agreed that the 1,200 acres of the 13,108 that made up the Butala ranch, that had been broken by settlers and that Peter usually had cropped by a neighbour, would be returned to their original state. To restore native prairie isn’t very easy either, and took considerable effort. Unexpectedly, oil companies knew something about how to do that, because many of their lease agreements required that they return any disturbed land back to its native condition, and they employed people who knew how. But we knew that the seeds for the original prairie had to come from a place very near to the land being reseeded so that the composition of the seeds and the soil they had grown in, as well as the weather conditions and characteristic amount of moisture, would be comparable. It wasn’t very long before this came about; the reseeding was a stunning success, and when we first saw the newly grassed fields a year later, Peter and I just stood there grinning in delight and surprise. The first year, though, the grass came in at nearly four feet high, causing us to scratch our heads in puzzlement, but the scientists explained that in time, the new grass would slowly revert to, at most, the foot-high grass characteristic of the mixed-grass prairie around it. As predicted, this came to pass.
The third major initiative that all parties agreed on was that the invader species of plants (plants not native to that particular prairie ecosystem) would be removed, although at that stage my impression was that nobody was sure precisely how to do that. In our case, yellow clover was a problem, as well as crested wheatgrass from Siberia, which had been introduced back in the 1920s by grazing specialists as preferable to the native prairie grass. They saw it as hardier and more nutritious. It certainly turned out to be hardier. Now it was taking over, crowding out the original prairie. A University of Alberta scientist brought in a team and carried out experiments to determine which of the three usual methods worked best: early heavy grazing, fire, or plowing. It took a while to do this, but the result was, I was told, that, in that situation, early heavy grazing was the best way of killing off the unwanted invaders.
There was no end to the excitement in that five-year period when so much was going on and people were coming from all over the country to see the Old Man On His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area, now called verbally, strictly for ease, the Old Man On His Back Ranch (or OMB) and sometimes even the Butala ranch. As I write this, I am making preparations to attend the twentieth-anniversary celebration of its establishment. I think it will be a sad affair for me, as well as a joyous one, not just because Peter won’t be there, but because most of the original participants in this glorious project — who remember how exciting it was, how thrilled we all were, how devoted to the endeavour — will not be there, having retired or moved on to other work, and in one significant case, sadly, died.
Once the contracts were signed and the Nature Conservancy of Canada became manager and owner, we kept on ranching for another six years, and held our herd dispersal sale in 2001, although by then Peter had cut back the herd bit by bit so that it was a small sale. Still, he was so devastated by what it represented that I had to persuade him to attend it. He had only six years after that, good years when he kept an eye on the place and was the official tour-giver, guide, and interpreter (how he relished that job), and we could finally get away to travel, sailing around Orkney and the Shetlands, even all the way to mythic Fair Isle in the North Sea (how he loved sailing!), with our biggest trip together being six weeks away in Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji. I have always been grateful he was well enough for that trip, the fulfillment of a dream he had held for many years.
During this period when we were more or less retired and had begun travelling, but before that last Australian trip, Peter, with great curiosity, entered my world. We had already been to a number of productions in which my actor-writer son, Sean Hoy, had had roles. Peter had viewed them with great interest rather than the bored patience I had expected. We often drove a hundred miles into Swift Current to see productions, music or theatre, brought in by the local arts council, then drove the hundred miles back home. At one of the first of these we attended, the actors had mimed driving in what we would have called a “ground blizzard” (when a strong but low, driving, snow-laden wind keeps you from seeing the road except in glimpses now and then). To do this, two sets of actors with one actor at each end of long flexible strips of white cloth twisted, rippled, and flapped them so that it mimicked exactly what the road would look like to a driver. Peter, apparently never before having seen what professional stage effects can do, said, out loud, in amazement, “T’hell!”
Travelling around the world was thrilling, and we lapped up every new sight, every mode of travel — ever the technology lover, Peter especially couldn’t get over the high-tech cross-country buses we took in Mexico from Mexico City or Guadalajara to San Miguel de Allende, claiming there was no such thing in Canada — and every new country. After our yachting excursion in the North Sea and a number of other trips, he decided he wanted most to see where his Slovak father had come from; he wanted to know something about his ancestors. He didn’t mention Ireland, his mother’s ancestral home as it was my mother’s, but I feel sure we would have gone there to seek out the church and graveyard if nothing else, if he had lived longer. (After he was gone, I went twice by myself to Ireland and, with the help of some wonderful Irish people, found the ancestral home and land and graveyard.) Slovakia, however, turned out to be perhaps the most fascinating of all our trips, surprisingly so to me, who had expected nothing much of interest to myself and was doing it mostly to support my husband in his wish to see where he had come from.
This impulse of Peter’s to find his father’s village was and is anything but unusual on the Canadian prairies. So very many immigrants, well over a million, came from Europe around a hundred years ago or even sooner, most of them with children, and none of the original settlers, or almost none, was ever able to return for even a visit. My impression is that most of them — once the early hardship had lessened — had no desire to return, finding that, eventually, their lives in Canada were so very much better. There was no vicious oppression or torture, no constant war, free education for their children, and plenty of land for all. Peter’s father and his uncles were among those who seemed to hold no desire to return. But the next generation feels very differently, and once they have reached middle age, and assuming they are prosperous enough, many of them are eager to see their true homeland.
Our adventures in Slovakia — we took the ten-hour trip between Prague and Košice by train in order to see as much countryside as possible — I described in my non-fiction book Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West. In eastern Slovakia then, tourists were a rarity — almost nobody spoke English — so we had to buy small Slovak-English dictionaries and use our wits and a tourist guidebook to get from A to B. My one regret about that trip was that I couldn’t persuade Peter to take a local bus from Košice up north to the tiny village Andy Warhol’s family came from and where there is a cache of Warhol’s work I was dying to see.
We had a bit of wonderful good luck in that when we visited the archaeological dig in the centre of Košice where the original city dating back to the thirteenth century was being excavated, a young male guide with perfect English befriended us and, because we couldn’t, found the village on an old map. (It had been destroyed by the Communists twenty or so years earlier, and its inhabitants, who had been told this was to make a pristine watershed area for a dam called Starina that was then built nearby, were moved elsewhere.) Then in his small car he took us and another backpacking tourist, a young Englishwoman he had met the night before in a tavern, out into the countryside east of Košice to find it.
What an adventure that was, seeing the green and fruitful countryside, the tininess of the usually sloping fields — we were in the Carpathian Mountains — compared to the size we Canadians were used to, feeling the steady humidity, and marvelling at the bountiful green forest we trekked through. Pears grew there! The spiders were enormous, furry, and bright yellow! The small crumbling castles on the hills above were a delight. We could hardly believe Peter’s father could have left such a paradise, but thinking of the history he had left, and with the First World War about to start, we couldn’t blame him.
Then, after certain misdirections and errors, there it was, what was left of the village — nothing, it turned out. But even Communists couldn’t move the graveyard. It and the small ceremonial building placed there by the villagers after their dispersal were all that was left. The graveyard was full of Butalas, but sadly the high humidity had left many of the grave markers, especially if made of iron, unreadable, or, if of wood, decayed. We stayed a couple of hours while Peter, moved beyond speaking, the look on his face not describable, dug in the thick green grass, scraped off headstone surfaces, and searched for his ancestral past. We spent another week in the Slovak Republic, but after the graveyard, there could be nothing but anticlimax.
As I’ve written, Peter wasn’t good at talking about his feelings, and I read the importance of this trip to him in the way he held his face and from what I saw in his eyes. I have tried to extrapolate from my own moments driving around the lake district of Northern Ireland and staring at the house, still in use, that my great-grandfather had grown up in, what it was Peter might have been feeling. But I couldn’t do it; the two experiences were too dissimilar — he finding his own father’s past and I having to go back much farther than that to a man I never in my life saw, about whom I knew only stories, none flattering, although sometimes funny. I was fascinated but not moved; Peter was profoundly moved, and did not want to leave. He told me he had been searching, although fruitlessly, for his grandfather’s grave. He was diligent in that search, and I thought it was as if all his life he had been floating and wanted to find an anchor, and thought that in his grandfather’s grave he would find it.
This was touching to me, although also puzzling, until I remembered that on my father’s side I am deeply proud to say that we are Acadians and can trace our family to the arrival on these shores of the first ancestor in 1647. Once I understood this, some yearning dropped away from me. I felt that — despite my failed struggles to become bilingual, and my not having lived in a French community since I was a small child, and never among Acadians — I knew who I was; I know who I am. Peter’s desire to find his grandfather’s grave took on a deeper meaning.
But many cultures practice ancestor worship, or something close to worship; those are people who have stayed for many generations in the same place. In the Canadian West it is commonplace, even seemingly de rigueur, to make that trip back to the ancestral home, proving, it seems to me, the universality of that desire to know where one comes from and thus, in some barely explainable sense, who one is. It is a craving of the human soul.
So we went to Slovakia, we found his paternal family’s burial site, we went back home again, and he did not talk about it. Yet, also oddly, he was determined to preserve the ranch his father and uncles had created in this new country, having arrived penniless; he was almost completely invested in his identity as the man who had done this, or who would do it, even though his name would not be on it. He bowed to the earlier claim of the Indigenous name, the Old Man On His Back Plateau. He experienced no grief over this, saying, “It is bigger than that,” meaning that the project was bigger than his family name. Of course, in the interpretative centre his and his sisters’ names are prominent, and there is also a stone memorial to him out on the land. It may be, it occurs to me, that his land and his devotion to it took the place of the natural son he never had, the one who would have carried on the Butala name. As for his father, who died only months after our marriage, I didn’t know him well enough to have a sense of how he would have felt about Peter’s endeavour, although I do know that he was very proud of him. “I never thought,” I once heard him say, gazing admiringly at Peter from across the room, “that I would have such a son!”
It was remarkable that Peter and I survived together for over thirty-one years, especially in the face of predictions that it wouldn’t last a year. Even though I came from a family of five girls (“Your poor father,” people sometimes said), and even though I’d been married before, men had always been a mystery to me, as I was never raised with brothers. It took us a long time together before he began to be demystified. But that is true, I suppose, of all marriages.
As well, moving from the culturally forward-looking university community into a small society where women were definitely second-class citizens, being reduced to the silent helpmate in public circumstances was a challenge for me. I survived only because Peter was proud of me and treated me with respect, so that in his presence the other men were usually not dismissive of me. Over time we found a way to meld our separate and often contradictory worlds, because, in the end, we shared the same values. If he had not been stricken with illness and died too young at only seventy-two, we would have continued to love one another.
As it does for most couples, what we shared in the beginning transformed as the years passed. His sudden, unexpected attraction to me that I didn’t take very seriously and my slower attraction to him began to deepen as we learned to know each other better, and bit by bit, he let slip stories of his own past, and I did the same for him. Then, as we both aged, and I slowly withdrew from most active participation in the ranching work, and he had to examine some of his unacknowledged assumptions — chiefly that I, a five-foot-tall, college-educated non-athlete would be made into a tobacco-chewing, horse-breaking cowgirl, or even a silent, hard-working, acquiescent partner who was always a rank below him — we stepped back a little from our early years of marriage and reconsidered. I had learned so very much from him, had learned to deeply value rural life through his experience and tutelage, whether planned by him or not, and he had grown in sophistication and shed some of his youthful notions about life. We had learned some boundaries that there would be no crossing, even while we had each moved some distance from the people we were when we married.
But at the end, as he lay dying and I stood beside him, my hand on his face, in an unspoken communication that was private between us, it was at last clear to us both that we had become linked together forever in our souls. I see this connection now as something larger, richer, and deeper than romantic love, and I am the more grateful for it.