By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
On Tuesday, March 7, my best birding friend Michael G. and I celebrated the 40th anniversary of our wedding.
There are days that live in your memory, blazing waypoints that remain undimmed by the years, and the day I married Mike all those years ago is one of those days.
We were wed in Del Rio’s Grace Lutheran Church because I insisted on a church wedding, and the ceremony and the hours preceding it can only be described as a disaster. I was sick most of the day, even ending up in the emergency room a few hours before the ceremony was set to begin. I finally dragged my pale, queasy self to the altar, only to have Mike faint dead away moments after we spoke our vows. True story.
We’ve always liked to say that the wedding was terrible, but the marriage has been great.
To mark our anniversary, Mike and I decided to spend a few days away together in Bandera, Texas, where we’d spent our honeymoon. Back then we stayed at the Mayan Dude Ranch, but rather than repeat our stay there, we picked the West 1077 Guest Ranch.
It turned out there were no other guests on the 230-acre property, and the cabin we’d rented was the farthest away from all the other buildings on the ranch. In other words, several blissful days of each other’s company.
On our first night at the cabin, we were outside on the porch looking at the stars when we heard a strange purring trill from off in the live oaks nearby. At first we thought it might be an insect, then some type of nightjar, like a Common Nighthawk, but it was too early in the year for these types of birds.
Then we thought it might be an owl, and that’s exactly what it turned out to be: a male Eastern Screech-Owl singing what’s known as a “monotonic trill,” which he uses when courting.
Owls are among the birds that are believed to mate for life, and in my Native American tradition, the appearance of owls is believed to aid one in discerning the whole truth of a situation. Mike and I thought it a fitting welcome to our few days away, on all levels.
We spent time over the next two days bird watching in the nearby Hill Country State Natural Area and on the West 1077 itself, and we can’t wait until we can schedule a longer visit.
There isn’t enough time or space here to tell you about what an extraordinary human being I was lucky enough to marry. Let’s just say I’ve signed on for the next 40 years.
—
Contact the author at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com
