Forty-Five Left to Go

We were in that tricky spot in our marriage where the honeymoon had worn off, and we were still frantically trying to figure out how to live with each other.  I think we'd been married a little over four months.  The life expectancy of our bliss was the same as the life expectancy of light bulbs, and we stood in the aisle at Lowe's trying to figure out the difference between halogen and incandescent. 

An elderly couple came by, pushing a cart with a poodle in the baby seat.  We stopped them to ask about the dog and give her the appropriate pats on her head- as fluffy white as her owners'. 

"Are you newlyweds?" the wife asked shrewdly.

I wondered if we wore our awkward affection like a sandwich board.

"We've been married fifty-six years."  She smiled at her husband.  "Don't worry - the first fifty are the hardest."

Florida: A Tradition in Mayonnaise

It takes my breath away how a place almost 900 miles from where I grew up can hold such vivid, beautiful and heartbreaking memories.  Maybe it is the regularity of it.  As certainly as spring arrives, we make the trek to northern Florida.  Over sixteen years, our family has grown, we have spread out further and further across the country, and our schedules have diversified; but still, we meet at the Gulf with tenacity.

  

Years ago, I would spend the night before our trip making sandwiches.  The way I remember it is endless rows of rolls that needed to sawed in half, the crumbs going everywhere.  Armed with a large jar of Hellmans and a butter knife, I would slap mayonnaise on the top half of each roll.  Faced with such a mundane task, my imagination ran wild.  As I put mayonnaise on roll after roll after roll, I was struck that, "the mayonnaise quivered expectantly." 

So thrilled was I with this description of making sandwiches, that I put down my knife, ran to my room and wrote it down.  As though there was a chance someone might steal it.  I don't know what I thought the mayonnaise was expecting.  Perhaps the anticipation of sharing its existence with shaved turkey was almost more than it could take?

A Perfectly Normal Human Being

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being. - Oscar Wilde

I love my husband. He is funny, smart, loves God, and loves me. Nobody can make me laugh harder than he can. Last night he was on the couch and he pulled me into his lap. I wrapped my arms around him and put my head on his shoulder. He squeezed me tight and said, "I just love it when you're right here like a blanket...a very thin blanket."

Last night we started working on one of my projects. My amazingly talented sister Christina makes beautiful multimedia artwork. When she was describing them to me, I realized that this would be an excellent way for me to deal with a problem I've been pondering for a while. I have wonderful memories from college, as well as some beautiful letters and mementos. Presently, however, they are all just sitting in a box under our bed. Every once in a while I pull this box out and read through some of the cards; the words of affection and encouragement are as effective now as they were when they were first written. However, I don't like keeping them somewhere I rarely see them, and the master of the house doesn't like anything being kept in boxes under beds. Christina's mutimedia projects seemed like the perfect way to preserve and display some of my best memories.

Last night I went to Hobby Lobby and purchased a small canvas for $4. Other than that , I used only things that I had already at the house. Matt helped me go through my Martha Stewart magazines and find some pretty things to use in my collage. (Christina tells me that it isn't a collage, but mine is still at the collage level). I didn't want to cut up any of the articles, so I only cut up advertisements. Matt found the cutest little cartoon drawing of some pink owls in an ad for Las Vegas and I cut out some trees from an ad for soybeans. Then I put all this together with a picture of my neice McKenna. I was hesitant to use a photograph, but I'm supposed to be living more courageously and this seemed like a good place to start. I haven't finished yet (photos to come when the project is complete!), but it felt good to create again, make use of that picture of McKenna (which, ashamedly, has been in box), and do it all with Matt - who apparently is as talented at spotting owls in advertisements as he is at spotting them in the wild.

Tomorrow begins our first "money-free" weekend. Tonight I'm going to the grocery store to stock up on food. We might be bored, but we won't be hungry!