Anniversary

On a sometime rainy, sometime beautiful day five years and one day ago, Derek and I were married. We celebrated our fifth anniversary last night by leaving the kids with their Nana at Great-Gramma and Great-Grampa's house. Thanks to the three of them for taking on a sleepover with a toddler and a preschooler (and Momma forgot to pack the suce!).

In French, the word anniversaire is used both for birthdays and anniversaries. I rather like the connotation that anniversaries are the same as (or at least very similar to) birthdays: on that Thanksgiving weekend five years ago, something new was born. I hadn't really understood what it was or that it was being born or even how fragile the entity was. But I knew that something of great magnitude was happening. I guess that's why we threw that big party.

With a lot of work and a good measure of fun, Derek and I have nurtured the "us" that was born that day. We made these fantastic promises to see each other through all kinds of tragedies and celebrations. Little did we know what we would have in store in the first (and short) five years. Two children, two bouts of depression, grad school, two moves (one to a new city), a near-death experience for one of our parents and the subsequent long recovery, at least ten different jobs between the two of us, Mexico, Egypt, Cuba, Nova Scotia, saying hello to new friends and slowly letting go of some old ones, learning-learning-learning in ways we hadn't even conceived possible, laughing, crying, sighing. And here we are, five years in, and I can safely say that I am completely head-over-heels in love with my husband and best friend. I'll also easily admit that I haven't necessarily been in love with him every day in the past five years — though I have loved him every day — but over the course of the summer and with some effort to make time for just the two of us I have had the opportunity to fall in love all over again.



Ah, the faces of innocence. Beautiful.