“It takes only a moment to fall in love but a lifetime to prove that it was truly meant to be forever.”
I read this quote when you were sleeping beside me.
It captured the way the last the 25 years have evolved and the possibilities of the open space waiting in the next 25.
I’m excited.
I had been thinking about our milestone for weeks, playing and sappily listening to our wedding song while I walk the dog.
The lyric – only you cared when I needed a friend, believed in me through thick and thin – gets me every time.
And it has left me anticipating June 7 in the same awe I felt on our wedding day.
This time nothing needs to be planned.
The peony bush gave us two blooms when last year it gave us none. It’s a sign that a season of loss is reversible, inevitable, and necessary to grow.
Love in 25 years is not sustainable through grand gestures.
It lives in remembering to cut a sandwich on the diagonal or putting the cap on the empty seltzer bottle.
It’s in me rushing to leave i-love-you notes on everyone’s pillows before a business trip only to get to my room and find one from you in my suitcase.
It’s in the joy of our children’s birth , the mundane of changing diapers, parental problem solving, and spirited hot-tub talks on society in crisis.
I hear it in your ringing of the cow bell at FPU games and see it in the thumbs up from the sidelines to signal the boys are fine.
It’s in the breaking down and getting up and then wading in the depths of loss following jarring news on the other end of a phone.
It’s in the slow walk down the hallway after the ultrasound showed no heartbeat. And in the trust of coming back when you walk out the door.
It’s in the crumpled- note reminder with the word “believe” behind a refrigerator magnet.
It’s the hand at my back to stay present and the deep need to not waste a precious minute of our life together.
Love has always been you.
