five years of love and light

retrospective… 4… 3… 2… 1…

y’all, it’s been five years since i fell in love with this man!

five biggies from this past year:

1. our first trip to the e.r. as a couple; sickness and health: check.
2. we found dragon house 2.0, in all its wood stove glory, and started the bayou walk tradition, including sightings of a river otter and a baby hummingbird being fed.
3. rich performed in one flew over the cuckoo’s nest and i broke a board with my hand.
4. we took our annual trip to new york in september.
5. we got engaged beside a giant dragon in a magical forest filled with music and fairies.

we’re going out tonight to the same restaurant we went to five years ago for dinner, when we discussed our more or less healthy eating habits, coparenting arrangements, and musical and book preferences. (we had already covered quite a bit of life story background material at the laundromat, so we were filling in the more minor details.) we’ve decided that since we are five years older and wiser, we do not need to re-enact the sitting in his truck (until an hour i will not name) portion of the evening, during which the police came and made sure we were of legal parked-in-a-truck-at-an-unmentionable-hour age. instead, we will go home to bed like the grandparents we are.

my word for 2016 has been “lighthearted,” and though i’ve been struggling with things trying to weigh down my heart, the darkness and heaviness will not prevail. days like this make it ever so easy to remember my blessings, and be filled with lightness of being.

this e.e. cummings poem right here….

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

the paradoxical lightness my heart feels in carrying around another heart… this and many other miracles (e.g. the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart) i plan to spend the next 99+ years studying in depth by this man’s side.

tomorrow i’ll wake up again to more greatest hits of our love soundtrack, and smile just like i do every day when i hear my ring click cheerfully on the glass of the jar of honey i will stir into his coffee and tea. we’ll chuckle about “barticle” the cat insisting that he fits perfectly into a box 2 sizes too small for his 19 pounds. we’ll shuffle around in slippers and pull on sweatshirts and hug and kiss goodbye for another day. and if i’m lucky, i’ll forget whether we kissed and get a bonus one before we head off to work.

then i’ll pick up my kiddo after two long weeks apart, and we’ll all celebrate some more.

happy holidays from our nerdy-glasses family to yours!

and hurray for the return of the sun, to lighten our hearts even more!