Tuesday Slice: Twenty-eight years

This Saturday marks our twenty-eighth wedding anniversary.  I searched online for traditional twenty-eighth anniversary gifts, and came up empty-handed.  The modern take is anything orchid--flower or color--but purple isn't a favorite color of my husband.

Our college boy comes home on Saturday, so we'll celebrate earlier in the week, most likely with dinner and a movie.  I offered to pay for the tickets as my gift, and suggested to my husband that his gift could be the dinner part.  No muss, no fuss, nothing to dust; that seems to be the motto regarding gifts these days.  We have all that we need and more than we could want, the clutter of our lives on the cusp of overwhelming.

But what lives we have led, these past twenty-eight years!  Twelve jobs between us (eight of them mine).  A premature birth.  A miscarriage.  A medically complicated birth.  The loss of two parents, a sibling, and four great-grandparents.  Eight surgeries in our family of four.  Two and a half college degrees.  Several trips across Texas and across states.  A solo overseas trip to London for me, and an excursion to Tokyo for all of us. 

I've lost count of the number of vehicles we've owned...we're currently at five cars, three motorcycles, and several bicycles.  (Why?  We have four drivers, and the extra car is the only one big enough to move college dorm necessities and lug home a Christmas tree.)  We've had but two homes; our rental when we first married, and the house we bought the year after, now paid in full.  We have no desire to move, having built our lives and collected memories in these walls.

We've had our ups and downs over twenty-eight years, but we've always, always had each other.  Here's to at least twenty-eight more--more love, more laughter, more memories to share.