The Mrs. suggested the walk on Thursday. We walk a lot, in most weather. I walk most days on my own too, an hour usually, three or four when an hour won't do it. That's my kind of walk. This was hers: proposed midweek, no occasion. That kind is never just a walk.
There's a castle near us, the Flemish kind: long straight lanes of oaks, farmland on both sides, a moat. A baron owned it once. Now it's where the village walks.
Halfway out there's a small cross from the war, just off the lane. The baron did not die well. Our old neighbour saw it happen when he was eight, hiding in the ditch, and he told us about it on this same walk more than once. Now he's gone too.
We've been together for over two decades, so she doesn't read my moods anymore; moods are weather. She reads the season underneath. The screen still lit at midnight. The talking with my hands at dinner. The way a week suddenly has no dead minutes left in it.
Halfway down the long lane she said it: "I can see you've got the appetite again." Only she didn't say appetite. The word she used is goesting, and appetite is the nearest English gets to it, and it isn't very near. It's the word for whatever a man has when he's still committing code at 23:40.
It wasn't an accusation. Accusations you can argue with.
So I did the careful thing. She has seen this a gazillion times. Somewhere along the way she stopped being curious about the fire and started checking where the exits are. I can't blame her, and I said none of that. I stayed on the surface and told her the plan: the machine I've been building that runs my paperwork and collects what I'm owed, the rules I wrote for it, what I think it could become. The version with round edges.
She disagreed with about half of it. Then she committed anyway. Disagree and commit: somewhere a manager invented that phrase for meetings. She's been doing it as long as I've known her.
I could point you to the exact tree we were passing when she said the word.
We walked back past the moat, mostly quiet. Not the bad quiet.
Because you're mine, I walk the line.
— Johnny Cash