Joyous Anniversary

from me to my Beloved Beautiful Better Half!

Thank you, Sweet Thing, for eighteen rollicking years.  

May I have a few more years with you?

We know not what the future holds, but we know Who walks with us into the future.
I love you, Grace JoAnn

 

Wedding Bands and Homemade Noodles

A wedding band does not a marriage make.  It is merely an outward symbol of an inward commitment.  The commitment can be made without the symbol.  It is how the individuals live and love that matters.  My parents celebrated 58+ years of marriage to each other and neither of them ever wore a wedding band.  It was the love and commitment, the continuous celebration.

Hard work?  Certainly.  No matter how much two people care for each other it requires effort  to make the relationship work.  Willingness to make the effort is the thing most often lacking in failed relationships.  "I don't love her anymore."  "He doesn't appreciate me anymore."  A thousand other excuses but underlying them all is a lack of commitment and failure to expend any effort.

If you don't love her now, then you never loved her enough to ask her to marry you in the first place. As Johnny and June sang to each other "We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout."  A fever, lust, is a flimsy foundation for a marriage..

This started with the simple tableau that played out in our living room yesterday.  BBBH went to the kitchen and retrieved my wedding band which rested in a small cup since I went into hospital, the same small cup in which  she deposits her rings from time to time whilst she is kneading dough or making pie or noodles.  Neither of us feels unloved or unloving during these intervals in which the mere outward symbol is set aside, for the inner commitment continues to thrive.

My Beloved Beautiful Better Half brought the symbolic token to me and said,  "Let me put this ring on your finger again."

"If you had it to do all over again, would you still marry me?"

"Of course.  Just because I get mad at you doesn't mean I don't love you."

Then she lovingly replaced the ring on my finger.

  For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife.  --Jesus Christ

Caravan Cookstove

Throwback Thursday

I have mentioned, perhaps a long time ago, that I write this blog primarily for my own entertainment and that I am gratified if you find pleasure in it, too.

I do go back through the archives on occasion, as you have no doubt inferred from the occasional "reposts."  I found this one recently, liked it enough to bring it forward.  From November 2011.

Pawing around in the loose pictures box yields not only images, but memories. This may be the principal reason for taking photos and snapshots of people. The examples here were taken in the fall prior to our marriage in February. The little lady checking her watch there in the kitchen may have wondered why I had yet to arrive. Well, as you can see, the refrigerator has morphed into a Dodge Caravan, against which I am leaning. I am enjoying a beautiful fall evening and who knows what I am thinking? I don't even remember.

This may have been the very evening during which she asked me to marry her. At any rate, it is all the beginning of something good, something exciting, and so far, something lasting.
Might I say it is all good? I might, but is there such a thing as any marital relationship in which it is all good? In this instance, it started out good and just gets better and better!

Word of the day: inferred

Celebration of Marriage!

 

Twenty-five years ago I had the privilege of attending the wedding of son Craig and the beautiful Kim.  The ceremony was conducted at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Indianapolis.

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Saturday we were privileged to celebrate with this couple as they marked a quarter-century together.  The party was designed and hosted by their three daughters, Elizabeth, Jennifer, and Anna.  Here we see the daughters administering the "renewal of vows."  The girls wrote and conducted the ceremony; and who better to create vows for the couple than three young people who had lived in their home sixteen to twenty-two years?

It was lovingly done, but certainly with humor and poignancy.

And the happy family sets forth on the journey through the next quarter-century!