Camo Backpacks, Walgreens Slippers, and Hair-Cutting Scissors

Tokens of Our Monthly Love

I should be an old pro at goodbyes by now, dropping Lee Ray off at the Albuquerque Amtrak, crying into his shoulder and holding him tight in my pajamas, sweatshirt, wild hair, and no makeup while he looks like he could be in a Wrangler ad in his black cowboy hat and giant belt buckle that he won in a rodeo decades ago. He carries his camo backpack slung over his shoulder.

Later, when I tell my mom that it was hard to say goodbye, there’s a silence on the phone, then “Jill, you need to pull yourself together and put on clothes when you drop him off,” which makes me feel a hundred percent better. My mom is momming, and we laugh even as I hold back tears. “It’s so hard, mom,” I say. “I think it’s going to get easier, but every time it breaks my heart to say goodbye.”

“What you all have is very special,” she says. “But it’s hard to be apart, and it takes communication.” What she means is that Lee Ray and I can quickly get short with each other, the miles apart and the frustration taking a toll on on us. Over the years—we have been long distance for over four years—we’ve had a lot of high-school relationship drama torturing each other by not answering a call or text for days when one of us is upset and feeling unseen or unloved.

Both our moms know how much we mean to each other. My mom, at 84, is wise about most things, even long-distance love, which she had with my dad when he was in medical school and she was in New York, working at a Mad Men-style travel agency. Even though my parents got divorced when I was 26, when they were first together my dad was one of those men who knew how to use the phone, even if he was literally saving lives on the table.

Lee Ray’s mom, who just turned 81, has always rooted for us, even from the first time I was on the ranch and ended up staying two weeks, Lee Ray and I were “taken with each other,” as she put it.

“I want you guys to make it,” she said recently. She and Everett, Lee Ray’s dad, have been together 64 years—but she first met Everett when she was 16 and was told, “stay away from those wild Jackson boys, they’re trouble.”

They’ve become second parents to me, showing me what a good marriage looks like. Even when Everett is running late moving cows and Flo has a “Oh, Everett Jackson!” moment. It’s still a model of the love I want.

Meanwhile, Lee Ray and I are getting slightly better at not guilt tripping each other: “You said you would call and you forgot about me!” (me, at 58 years old) followed by “I’m sorry honey, I just miss you,” a few minutes later, versus ignoring him when he calls.

“Why aren’t you answering your phone?” he texts me. “Why are you ignoring me?”

But I’m usually not. I’m driving or on the treadmill, or on a Zoom.

This is us on long-distance, at 58 and 62. It’s not the glamour that some of my friends think is dating a cowboy, though most of my friends know of our high-school communication antics.

When we first met, Lee Ray would call me on horseback when he was moving cows. I could hear noise and moos in the background. Now he calls me from the helium plant on the ranch, where he’s managing that operation instead of moving cattle and doing ranch work, which I know he misses. But he loves machines and knows drilling and as much as I sometimes get upset with how busy this is making him, also admire him for it.

My world has changed so much that new surroundings and even the big open blue sky of New Mexico that should be familiar because it’s only a few hours from where I used to live in Colorado, is somehow foreign. I was a latecomer to “Breaking Bad,” which I binged during the Covid lockdown. But now I understand how it was set here in Albuquerque, which is somehow spooky and funky with an underpinning of aggression and surrealism. I can’t put my finger on it, except that as I’ve said before, it’s a lot like Oakland, of which even longtime residents said “there’s no there there.”

So I’m discombobulated because it’s still a strange place and the job I moved for disappeared in the politics and unexpected events of the university so that I landed in another department and fully remote—from Albuquerque. At least for now.

But I have to think that our relationship can withstand the change and pressures of life away from each other because it continues to and because we actually talk about the future—one where we’re not taking Amtrak to see each other.

It’s a future where we wake up together and I watch his eyes close as I chatter away in bed at 8:30 pm because he’s been up so long. I get my computer so I can watch the Housewives and look over and see him peacefully asleep on his back. It’s an exquisite pleasure to touch his head and stroke his hair when he’s asleep and not on the move, to gently pull his arm over and burrow into his chest as he holds me like a package.

“I love sneaking out of bed early and fixing breakfast and then watching you sleep,” he said this morning. Even though he’s often lighthearted and joking to my Eeyore seriousness and gray clouds, he’s a romantic. “I’m going to miss how you feel,” I said to him yesterday, putting my arms around him. “You’re like a big piece of warm concrete.”

“I feel great, honey,” he said, winking, trying to get me to just live in the moment and laugh. So I took out the scissors and tweezers and my favorite and only client took a seat next to the window for his trim.

I bought a pair of slippers and pajama pants for him to wear when he visits—back when we met right before Covid hit. How lovely will it be when those are just part of the daily routine of being together, not something I store and take out when he comes.

I sometimes think that maybe we’ll be long-distance for as long as we’re together, that maybe that’s just how we’re supposed to be. I can rail against it and cry about it and then not answer his calls, or I can live in the reality of what it feels like to love someone and not self destruct or lose myself or run away. I can also marvel at the changes that we’ve been through together, the jobs, the new city, the knowing that we’ll be there for each other even if we’re on a learning curve. And as times goes by, knowing somehow that we will be under the same roof for longer than a few days or a few weeks, it’s just a matter of time.