It's Flag Day!

And, coincidentally, it is also my tenth wedding anniversary. We picked Flag Day as our wedding day to ensure that we would never forget the date, what with all the fanfare surrounding Flag Day every year. It has worked like a charm.

I remember my wedding like you remember every momentous occasion; every birth or death. There are moments that are frozen in my mind with a crystalline clarity; so present to me that can I still see the sun glinting off of my new ring or feel the rumble and whoosh of the bagpipe bellows deep in my sternum. Yet for every thing I'll never forget, there is a counterpart, a moment that has slid by jumbled and blurred by time and the vagaries of memory. I remember hugging my seven year old brother as he sobbed and begged me not to move away, but I cannot remember the flavor of our wedding cake. It's the way of life.

Every anniversary is a chance for me to recapture that day, and also to let that day go a little bit. These past ten years have been the sweetest of my life: they have brought me a husband and a partner, my darling, dimpled babies, my long-legged children, my place in the world, my vocation. My wedding was just a day, but it was the day this union, this grand adventure, this life began, and I know without a doubt that I would do it a hundred times over again.

Ten years ago today, I . . .

• spent a sleepless night in curlers



• felt like a princess in ivory matte satin



• trembled on my father's arm



• very carefully offered the brimming cup of the Blood of Christ to my family and friends



• waved at a procession of Harleys as they blew their horns and cheered for us



• watched my husband spin his unfamiliar wedding ring around his finger all night



• laughed when our very large caterer dove to the ground to catch the top tier of our wedding cake as it slid off of its pillars (I never did get a real piece of my wedding cake)



• cut what was left of the cake and then smeared it on Rob (we are not a dainty, decorous people)



• sat for two solid minutes in awe of Rave extra-strength hairspray. After my headpiece and hair pins were removed, my hair remained curled atop my head in the same position. Rave defied the very laws of gravity, and for less than a dollar, to boot.



• thanked God for every minute

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out,
just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will
take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness,
blow the rest away. --Dinah Craik

Happy Anniversary, Robert. I love you.