Today is our 29th anniversary. Twenty-nine years is a pretty good length of time. Of course, it can't hold a candle to the 63 years my mom and dad had together, nor the 50+ years of my in-laws.
But still...a pretty good length of time.
Tom is at work, so when I got up this morning, I decided to pull my wedding dress out of the closet. No, I don't have it all sealed up--it's in a Rubbermaid box tucked in with my mom's dress and corsage from that day and the little box that held my engagement ring. I like to look at that wedding dress each anniversary when it comes to mind. I like the feel of the heavy satin; I like to look closely at the stitching and the impossible amount of lace and buttons on it. It was a dress made in a time when attention to detail was much more commonplace.
Then I decided to pull out our wedding photo album to take a picture and post the quintessential anniversary photo on Facebook to mark our day. I was a little surprised at just how rough the little book looks. It's not been through much trauma--the moves have been minimal and it, like most older wedding albums, has been tucked away from the elements. Nevertheless, it's kind of scarred up. All that "attention to detail" of the dress? That just didn't translate to the wedding pictures and albums of the 1980s...it wasn't quite there yet. It's amusing now to see, these many years later, after taking so many thousands of pictures myself, the "rough edges" of the photos. Shadows in the pictures, the background cross placed strategically out the back of my beloved's head, my misplaced bangs creating a space needing to be brushed, some very somber looks taken before the smiles came...a humbling group of photos. Nothing like the high-intensity, very stylish pics coming from weddings nowadays...nothing like that. Just pictures. But simple pictures of two people very much in like and in love with one another.
So, these lingering reminders of our special day on the calendar do tell a bit of the story of these 29 years. We're no longer those grinning kids in those photos with brunette locks, or locks at all--we're more like the album itself. We're a little rough around the edges, a little scarred, a little discolored. Like that album, we've protected those pristine, innocent, wonderful memories and hopes and dreams and made those 29 years pretty darned amazing. And, like that dress, the stitching is strong, the small details are still important, and the over-all beauty still lasts.
Happy anniversary, Tom...my sweetheart.
