A Walk with Jane Austen by Lori Smith Page B

surrounded me in a Pigpen-like cloud.
    Even my lips became less than lovely. The special ChapStick I had bought for the trip smelled pungent like medicine, and my cheap trashy-sparkly lip gloss hinted of chemicals rather than berries.
    So my stinky feet and I put on our flip-flops and sweatpants and headed out on the lawn to smoke Cubans with Jack and Paul.
    We sat in the wet grass, the evening glowing with the luminescent, late blue hour, the hour of dusk that many believe to be holy. (I am among them.) Eventually, we were lit by nothing but lights from the windows.
    Paul, raised in a good, strict Assemblies of God home, chose to abstain. “Smoke a cigar and go to hell? No, I don't think so.” He laughed.
    We talked about grace and alcohol, about how Jesus might have acted at a party, about Paul's brother, who had been an alcoholic and then was miraculously cured.
    I told Paul and Jack about only recently discovering that I grew up with a view of the world where there were good people (Christians) and bad people (everyone else) and how I'd finally realized that I had been looking down at the world all these years and knew that we are all loved the same and all flawed the same—all of us equal before God. That God could be just as present at a party where guys were smoking joints on the back porch as he was at my Bible study—present in a different way, but still present and reaching.
    When you see the world this way, any place can be holy.

    All ofthat talk of some other girl in North Carolina has been forgotten.
    I don't know exactly what it means to fall in love or what I think about that, so I'm not sure how to talk about what has been happening between Jack and me. Fundamentally, I believe that
love
is a verb, that it is doing things you may not feel like doing and giving and listening and generally putting someone else in front of yourself. Perhaps it's not possible to make that kind of commitment for a lifetime without an initial rush of emotion. Sunday night after we met, when we went to Evensong and to the pub and walked home talking about our families and mornings and evenings, I knew this had potential. Last night I thought it could be serious. And tonight I know—well, I'm not sure exactly what—perhaps that he is The Guy I Never Thought I Would Meet.
    My perception of time has changed. There are so many significant moments, so many in each day that the days feel stretched into weeks, and I don't doubt that by the end of the week, I will feel like we've known each other for six months. The contrast between days in Oxford and days at home—which can pass distractedly with a couple loads of laundry, a movie, and a Target run—makes me feel the malleable subjectivity of time.
    Unlike other relationships I've had, my love for Jack seems to have depth and stability, to be founded on mutual faith and genuine respect, honest intellectual conversations, strong doses of humor and comfort. So our attraction has something solid on which to play. It's all rather Austenian.
    In some ways, this Big Thing is a combination of hundreds of tiny important things. If alone they are small, together they are undeniable, pointing to something true and sound, of incredible value—pointing to us.
    At least, it seems that way to me.

    I am, actually, afraid that people will look back on my own scant love life someday and assume that nothing ever happened, that my heart was never touched. And I wonder if my life will turn out more like Jane's life or like the heroines’ lives in her books.
    I sat looking out the patisserie window, streaming and sniffling, trying to eat a chocolate croissant.
    I woke to the darkness of 3:30 a.m., after just three and a half hours of sleep. I lay awake through the gradual graying of the sky coming inthrough my open window, listening to the birds, turning things over and back again in my mind—bits of conversations, the way Jack and I fit, the perfection of it all. I was in awe at the certainty of