She is not a country girl. She’s a city girl. She’s the city girl next door. She likes the outdoors but she is not outdoorsy. She loves camping for sleeping under the stars in the tent, for coffee made over the fire in the morning, for reading in the hammock in the afternoon, for dinner by the fire in the evening. But she’s a city girl. She loves having a patch of grass, or a back porch, the tiniest of her own outdoor space, in the city. She loves walking, in the city. She loves walking on the beach or in the woods too, but not as much if you’re going to call it hiking. If there are hills involved, she does not love it as much.
Early on, when he was still her very new boyfriend, probably right after that word was introduced, which was day one, now that we think about it, anyway, she and her new boyfriend/future husband went to a secret beach in Michigan, and to get to the secret beach you had to climb down a dune that was at a ninety-degree angle to the beach. Okay, maybe eighty. An angle sufficiently steep that going down it didn’t seem like an option at all. Something that looked more to her like a cliff than a dune. You can’t slide down a ninety-degree cliff dune. This wasn’t a secret beach, it was an unreachable beach. The punk friends were already waiting at the bottom, setting up their blankets. The girlfriend/wife-to-be looked around for a gentler slope. There wasn’t one. This was it. This was the difference between them. She liked a flat beach, a flat hike. A cliff dune was nothing to him. It was over.
I’m a city girl. I can’t do this. I’m going to fall.
You won’t, the new boyfriend/husband-to-be reassured her. I’m right here. Just lean forward, he said.
That makes no sense! she said. He held her hand. She wiped away a few tears. She leaned forward. Ish. They got down the dune.