I worked only in the middle of the night so as not to arouse suspicion. It was winter, and in the cold and pitch-black of that wild country, shivering and sawing deep in the woods, I began to get a sense of the complexities and sacrifices of marriage. We were to be married on the first day of spring in the same pecan orchard where I had proposed three months earlier. I thought that was plenty of time to build a bed, but trees are tougher than they seem. You might saw for hours with no sign of progress, and then suddenly the tree creaks and sways a little at the top, and the enormity of it scares you.
Marriages are like that, too.
It took several days to cut the tree into manageable lengths. My plan was to transport the tree in sections to my house forty miles away, where I could work on shaping the pieces and fitting them together. It was a little less than half a mile from where I felled the tree to my car, all uphill. In a marriage, too, I've found, everything might seem as if it will work out perfectly, but there are many things you don't foresee. You have to try everything to make it work - just as, somehow, I had to get that tree up that hill and loaded into the trunk of my car.