Celebrating an Anniversary

 

Family portrait after 15 or so anniversaries.  

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

 

 

 Forty-eight years ago I was spending my last night at home in my childhood bed. On the morrow I was getting married. Much too young. Only seventeen and barely that. My husband to be was a few years older, already twenty, but very young too. Our lives were getting ready to drastically change as we were set to begin our life together.

 

 

 I don’t remember exactly how I was feeling that night, but I’m sure I was nervous. Unsure of what to expect. Darrell may have been feeling the same. Both of us young, ignorant about the realities of adult life, but ready to be thrown into the marriage pond to see if we could swim. And somehow we stayed afloat in spite of our youth. In spite of having two kids before we’d been married three years. With the Lord's help, we kept our heads above the water as we struggled to make ends meet.

 

 

We farmed. We took care of the kids. We had loving family support. We made it year by year. The years keep piling on. Now sometimes people look at us as if being married to the same person that many years is an amazing wonder, not a normal part of living. You know the good advice about how to get older, don’t you? Keep breathing. So that’s the same with being married a lot of years. You just keep on keeping on. That’s what we’ve done the same as many other couples I know.

 

 

I once read a little story about a woman who had been married many years. When a new bride asked her advice on how to have a long and happy marriage, she told her that when she married she made a list of ten things she wouldn’t let upset her about her husband. When the younger woman asked her what those ten things where, the older woman said she didn’t remember. She simply assumed whatever came up to be friction between her and her husband was on the list and she refused to get mad about it. So perhaps she was the farmer’s wife the following quote is bragging on.

 

 

 Love is the thing that enables a woman to sing while she mops up the floor after her husband has walked across it in his barn boots. ~Hoosier Farmer

 

 

Can’t say I’ve ever been quite that understanding although I have mopped up plenty of boot tracks in my time. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t singing a happy song while I was mopping. But we are still married. And there have been many happy songs over the years.


Good times. Blessed years. Neither of us is much like we were when we married. Life pushes us along a changing course and we are made stronger by the experiences that come our way. Even so, love and commitment doesn’t have to change. We’ll keep rolling along, trying to encourage one another, enjoying the children of our children. Feeling blessed.

 

 

 May God be with you and bless you. May you see your children's children. May you be poor in misfortune, rich in blessings. May you know nothing but joy. From this day forward. ~Irish Blessing
 

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a wonderful week of Thanksgiving.

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.