Our wedding anniversary today was off to a bit of a rough start. At about 2:45 a.m. and after a whopping 30ish minutes of sleep, I awoke to the kind of gut pain that reminded me once again I really do need a plan B for those occasions when a son or two doesn’t happen to be providing adult supervision.
Technically one of the anniversary celebrants isn’t here, but the four beings we welcomed within a handful of years now also grace this planet, and their father still accompanies them as well.
Given the borrowed 1800s wedding dress, from a trunk my mother’s friend happened to have picked up at an auction, you might think the first photo preceded the last by at least a good century-and-a-half, but only a blissful almost twenty-eight years separated them.
This is what newsprint looked like, kids.
The first picture looks so somber to me now, but not the second. In the second, our children are just out of sight, harmonizing with barking sea lions under a glorious equitorial sun. We all know this would be our last trip together in any traditional way.
We knew their father would die, as he did only weeks later, after we’d returned to the frigid Northeast. That day, snow fell as Spring began and all of us surrounded him at home.
Happy anniversary.
I found your card.
Love in the Spaces 
Happy memories Stephanie.
Thanks for inviting us to your newsprint memories. I’m sure the wedding was far from somber. Time doesn’t really heal, does it? It just requires the memories to travel further down the road of our soul. When they do arrive, they are gold and grave.