The Properties of Silver

by Sonya Spillmann

“Where do you want to go?” I ask my husband. 

“Where do you want to go?” he responds in turn.

I want to fly to the lapis blue domes of Santorini, or sleep over turquoise water in a thatch-roofed hut. I want to pack-ride on horseback, hike striations of sandstone in the Rockies, camp at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I want to wear little more than a swimsuit; I want early mornings and a backpack and to collapse into bed at night after a day full of sunshine. 

Which is to say, I don’t know what I want. Nor have we planned for it. 

It’s not like we didn’t know this year was coming—along with our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary—yet it seems like our own life has caught us off guard. 

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Until recently, I thought the process of refining silver was easy. From Sunday school teachers to preachers at the pulpit, I’ve heard the same biblical metaphor: heat the metal and what’s impure will either burn off or come to the surface. Scrape that off—with the molten-metal strainer you have laying around?—and there you are. Silver, pure from the refiner’s fire. 

But is purification really ever that simple? 

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It’s just the two of us and even the air is holding its breath. I can’t say if I am in the comforting arms of our living room couch or if I stand against the cool counters in the kitchen. What I do remember is feeling like we are two kids hurling rocks at a fence line in the distance, both of us so angry and sad, so desperate for our words to land, to connect with the overwhelming weight of our emotions.  

“We need to go to marriage counseling,” I demand. I’d said these words for years, once during a hard season before we had kids, and then in unpredictable intervals afterward. Each time, they coincided with a series of arguments, after months of disconnect, or when I felt depleted and ignored. I’d throw them out and they’d land in a muffled thud—the sound of an unheeded threat. 

But this time? The words hit metal. Something has to change. 

“Fine,” he spits back. “But you need to go to counseling, too.” 

As if in defiance, as if I were a tired little kid being told to go to bed—the very thing I need and want—my eyes turn to slits and I sneer, “Fine. I will.”