A Lifetime Commitment

 A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. ~Paul Sweeney

My husband and I celebrated our anniversary yesterday. In rather laid back ways. No big trips or dinners. We went to Louisville to walk in the St. Jude Give Thanks. Walk. That was to support St. Jude Hospital that has done so much for my little great niece who has leukemia but is now in remission. This walk is a fundraiser the whole family takes part in to raise money for the hospital so they can keep helping children like Kaelyn. Then Darrell's group sang at a community center for a Thanksgiving dinner. The night before our anniversary we went to a booksigning of four writer friends. So I guess our weekend was full of the things we both love - family, books, and singing. 

 A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time. ~Anne Taylor Fleming

We've been married forever. Well maybe not forever in the sense of history forever, but nearly forever in our own history. The battered and well worn picture above was taken the first year we started dating. We were at an amusement park with a church group and ducked into one of those little booths they used to have where you put in your coins and the machine spit out a strip of photos. Probably the very first picture of us together. We were both so young. And here's a recent picture. A lot of water under the bridge between the two photos. A lot of good times, a few hard times. 

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. ~Simone Signoret

That's how life goes. Many threads of life connecting us. It's the same with a book when I'm writing. I have to come up with those threads of life to make my story and people come to life. Of course I have to give my characters plenty of hard times because while happily ever after might make a good ending, happily the whole book through doesn't make for enough conflict to keep readers interested. Characters need problems to solve. 

Hope the threads connecting you with your loved ones this week are threads of happiness. Thanks for reading.