The fall of 2017 was turning out to be quite a revelation for Lorelai Gilmore-Danes.
She had never loved fall quite as much as she loved winter. Sure, there was the crispness wrought by the change of seasons and the concurrent excuse to shop for brightly colored sweaters and boots. There was the inevitable glut of Stars Hollow festivals to kick off the season and the culmination of wonder and excess otherwise known as Halloween. There were the crumbled cinnamon apple pies that she found just as often waiting for her on her kitchen table as she did cooling on the diner counter. There was the way the warm smells of pumpkin and cinnamon found its way into her clothes and hair and skin. And there was the way the shedding leaves in tones of brown and yellow and orange carpeted every available surface of her small town, fanning out and spreading anew every time a rambunctious child jumped into the hastily assembled piles collected by their parents. Once it had been her pint-sized little girl jumping into those leaves, squealing as they stuck to her pigtails and sweater: now those same squeals had been replaced by those of Rory's childhood friends as they wrecked those piles asunder.
Still, fall had never quite seemed as magical to her as the next season, when she could feel in her bones that the world was changing, that soon the clouds would put forth a magical veil of white over the world that would make everything soft and billowing and glossy. It was a season to be wrapped up in an otherworldly dream, to cover yourself in soft blankets and hot cocoa and leg warmers. It was the season where tired moms and kids and worn out business men turned into jubilant ice skaters and sled riders. Fall was cozy and enchanting in its own way, but it was merely a precursor to the marvelous spectacle that was winter, when everything that had seemed momentarily dark and foreboding in the months beforehand somehow dissipated in that ethereal glow that settled over the rest of her world with this final change of season.
However, this year fall had an entirely different meaning.
She was married. To Luke. The dream she once had held onto so fervently, the one that she had let destroy their relationship because she wanted it so badly, had finally come true. Lorelai had spent so much time working around that dream, building a life with him that could sustain them both, that she had never quite let herself admit how much she had still wanted it. In the past, she had chosen marriage over Luke, and forced them to endure the hardest year of their lives since they had come into each other's orbit so long ago. Once it was all over with, she had chosen Luke over marriage, knowing that what she wanted most of all was not to be separated from him again.
They had built a life together based not on labels or expectations but on their pure desire to simply be with each other. That life had its own pitfalls and shortcomings, same as any more conventional relationship, and working through what lines needed to be drawn so that they could maintain some sort of independence and still be together hadn't been easy. And nine years in, some of those pitfalls are seemed harder to manage than others. But it had been a good life, and both of them had finally found peace and stability within it.
The thing that Lorelai hadn't anticipated was that she would one day want more. She hadn't counted on coming to a point where she would wonder whether it was completely necessary to make those lines they had drawn seem like something that couldn't be adjusted or erased, that they had to remain etched in stone simply because she had decided that it would work better that way a long time ago. When she and Luke first got back together, April had been a fourteen-year-old girl with a very possessive mother who was still half angry at Luke for insisting on an equitable custody arrangement. Lorelai had learned the hard way not to meddle in too many of the big decisions: three stubborn adults arguing over a tearful teenage girl was not a situation that would bring peace to either of their houses. So, she had let Luke and Anna handle the hard stuff, and focused on what she considered her role to be as a quasi-stepmother, much of which had involved keeping Luke from murdering whatever questionable boyfriend was often seen hovering around the periphery of their home (not all of them teenagers). Those lines had made sense when April was still growing up, but did they even matter anymore now that she was a grown woman about to go off to grad school?
It was the same with her parents: knowing how much damage they had caused in the past, Lorelai had been reluctant to include Luke in every single interaction she had with them. That was only reinforced when her father kept pushing the issue of franchising Luke's, and had kept bringing up April's college education as a potential incentive for Luke to go ahead with it. Luke still ended up accompanying Lorelai to Friday Night Dinner about once a month, but Lorelai found it best that she limit their interactions beyond that to the occasional Gilmore function and holiday celebration. It was a balance that seemed to work for everyone involved: much of the thorny class issues that had come up in the past seemed to disappear, and the primary conflict usually revolved around Emily's disapproval of Lorelai's relationship status. But had all of those limits really been necessary, too? Luke had single-handedly paid for the parts of April's education that weren't covered by her scholarships, and was paying for grad school, too. He hadn't needed to change who he was to provide for his daughter, because taking care of the people he loved was who he was. Lorelai loved him for that, and she sensed that her parents appreciated it, too: after the first few years, the issue seemed to completely go away, and Richard and Luke had even seemed to bond a little. The franchising stipulations had been written into Richard's will, but vacillating between accepting her life decisions and trying to steer them in a direction that was more acceptable to high society was a dance that her parents had perfected over the decades. As much as Lorelai had wanted to protect Luke from it, she wasn't surprised that they had fallen into the same cycle when it came to him. In the long run, if that was the worst that came of it, was creating this distance between Luke and her parents really something that needed to happen?
It had taken her a long time, but she eventually found out she could have all of the things she had wanted. She could have the life she was living with Luke, and she could be married to him. She could make those things fit together in a way that made their life complete in a way that it hadn't been before.
It seemed so crazy to her that after all of these years adding those extra five letters to her names and putting both of those rings on her finger could make such a difference. Even the name change seemed to be something so radical yet so simple. She had never even contemplated it during his first attempt at matrimony, but this time it finally felt like something that fit her life. She could be Lorelai Gilmore, the woman who had built this wonderful life on her own, and still be wedded to Luke Danes, because that commitment was as big a part of her life as everything that had come before. She could be independent and be a wife, because she knew that Luke had unconditionally loved her for who she was as long as he had known her. He accepted her, and she accepted him, and now that acceptance was officially in print on her driver's license.
It felt good.