It’s a good thing to know you married the right woman. I suppose this is an ode. I wrote one for her once before, a song before we were married which said, “The road is long between our two towns,” but I don’t remember all the words and I’d have to go looking for the manuscript, which is a problem in our basement full of unpacked boxes. Thirty years of marriage and two children result in a lot of boxes.

So how does one know? Start by marrying a person who will drive from Madison to Evanston to the home of a new grandson so she can hold him between feedings, ignore everyone and everything else in the room, and do nothing but study his face and murmur to him for three hours straight.

Marry someone who prepares for moving by digging up snowflowers and asparagus given to her by her grandfather twenty years ago and irises given to her by my father and replanting them over the winter in a friend’s garden and then driving two hours in the spring to dig them back up to replant in our new yard. These are not flowers; these are valuable legacies left to her by loved ones. She treats people the same way.

Marry someone who loves to paint rooms, has an unerring eye for color, and is so good that she never needs to “tape” edges or woodwork. I do ceilings – with overlapping dropcloths, and when she laughs at my ineptitude, I pull out my Bunbury excuse, “You know I had a detached retina fixed.” Marry someone who lets you use the re-attached retina excuse on everything from painting ceilings to forgetting to pick up milk.

Marry someone who doesn’t want a king-sized bed and would rather “spoon.”

Marry someone whose first choice in cars is the oldest, boxiest Jeep she can find, and only then when Wagoneers are no longer available.

Marry someone who will fill a blackboard-painted wall with a colored chalk drawing to welcome home the new grandson, and do that after a day spent in scrubbing sinks, countertops, doing laundry and cajoling a repairman to rush over that day to fix the dryer by convincing the business owner that a new mother and her baby can’t possibly come home to a broken dryer.

Marry someone who needs less than five minutes to get “sucked in” to an old black-and-white movie on Turner Classic Movies, even a two-star movie, someone who enjoys the vintage clothes as much as the characters, and assumes that the plot doesn’t matter.

Marry someone who owns a lake out in the deep woods of the Upper Peninsula, especially if she has a brother who’s an engineer who knows how to build solar-panels and hook them up to a refrigerator, one who loves solar showers. Marry someone who can row a boat and will force her husband out of the tent at night just to look at the stars… not the pathetic suburban dozen or so lights that peep through the urban night clutter, but the honest-to-god Milky Way and shooting stars that still live in the U.P.

Marry someone whose favorite possession is a 50-year-old Peugeot ten-speed bicycle inherited from her aunt.

Marry someone who volunteers every week in her new friend’s second grade class because one student in particular needs one-on-one help. Marry someone who knows this is how to keep the same friends for over 50 years.

Marry someone who calls for computer help because she believes the computer will explode if she hits the wrong button. Marry someone who almost believes you if you tell her it might.

Marry someone who fills entire jump drives with digital pictures of clouds and fields taken out of a moving car – pictures that she might paint some day.

Marry someone who reads the Arts Calendar with the same intensity as she reads The Secret Life of Bees.

Marry someone who knows that music is not a monologue; it is a conversation.

Marry someone who knows that football is a father-son adventure; fly fishing is like yoga or meditation; the woods are as sacred as church; water must be painted as if it is alive; the right kind of warm light bulb matters; friends are more important than money; a lonely day is a day with fewer than a dozen phone calls; hot buttered popcorn with lots of salt is its own food group and popcorn is a requirement for old black-and-white movies on the Turner Classic Movies network.

Marry someone who remembers all the names for the faces you recognize, but can’t remember where her dozen reading glasses are.

Marry someone who will badger you to take a nighttime walk, especially if it looks and sounds like rain on its way.

Marry someone who will see a high school fight brewing in a parking lot and will drive her car at a crawl right into the middle of them even though she is alone, horn blaring the whole time, until the kids get scared and run away.

Marry someone who favors old things: houses, friends, books, jeans, furniture, recipes, coffee mugs, jewelry, family stories, and a husband.

Marry someone who laughs like a little girl, wears honesty like a tiara, prays a blessing every time a helicopter flies over our house to the nearby hospital, walks up to the high school when she hears a bagpipe band practicing, and babysits for friends so she can adopt their children. There are never enough children.

Follow these guidelines, my friends, and you will marry the right woman.