Red Earth Review #1

S. Cawood The Dance I gave up dancing the first winter of my marriage, just months after Bill and I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina from Ohio without jobs or family, to a place we imagined might make us happy.

That year, at 29 years old, I had learned the art of letting go of things that mattered to me—some a little, some a great deal more: living close to my parents and sister (Bill didn’t want to stay in my home state), having short hair (he liked long better), my admissions job (I still miss it), eating pretzels and frozen yogurt for dinner, and, eventually, dancing.

Not all were mistakes. Giving up dancing was.

The irony is Bill and I fell in love dancing. Our first date we had lapsed into uncomfortable silence as we faced each other at a table-for-two in Oxford, Ohio, where we both lived at the time: he working on a geography graduate degree, and I recruiting for Miami University. The restaurant, nearly empty, echoed with every sound—a scrape of chair, a fork clinked against tabletop— as if to remind us we had nothing to say.

After the date, I called up my best friend and said, “Well, that’s never going anywhere.” But then Bill and I met again at the Corinthian, a family restaurant that blushed into a salsa nightclub on Saturday nights in Cincinnati. I’d learned how to salsa dance there the year before. Dancing, in whatever form, had always served as a refuge for me, a place where I could shake loose fears and worries, an hour or two where rhythm and how my body moved overtook what clamored to keep me still.

“Come on,” Bill said, standing next to me in my chair and extending his arm toward me. He pulled me to the dance floor, and under the Corinthian’s soft lights—ones that muted flaws and flooded the space between us—we fell into each other’s arms that night as if we were meant to be and didn’t let go our entire courtship. We practiced turns, copas, and cross body leads until they felt like home.

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