Changes and lack thereof

Add a few years, and some things change. Friends move away. Stores close. New ones open. Music becomes incomprehensible, and also bad.

I look around me these days at my kith and kin and see…a lot more gray hair. Laugh lines and crow’s feet. We limp, we grouse, we have a we can’t fathom how the world isn’t going to careen into the abyss of absolutely DOOM in the very near future because ohmygah, the KIDS these days!

“Where we goin’, and why we in this handbasket?!”

Today, I am attempting to clean up my bedroom.

I know. I am the most exciting person alive.

But this is one of those too-seldom done things; our bedroom is not just the place where we crash at night, but is also my home office, and my craft room, and until very recently, my music room.

This means that all roads lead to it. And many, many things travel these roads. And then they pile up on every surface, get shifted from here to there, until eventually I try to grab a magazine and get buried by twenty thousand books and a few balls of Merino and who the heck left a crane in here, anyway…and I say, “Right, that’s it, I need to get some control over this!”

Which brings me to today.

When I yanked out a very dusty box from the back of a cupboard, and found a bunch of pictures. Pictures of me looking like a walrus that swallowed a beach ball (Boo Bug…man, I was huge while pregnant with her, and afterward for quite a while…), pictures of us in costumes for Renaissance fair, pictures of me with my harp, pictures of us in bizarre costumes at the Sea Dogs Halloween party, pictures of my brother when he was still a twerp…

And an envelope of our engagement picture proofs.

(You have no idea how hard it was for Ray [our Awesome Photographer] to get us to quit LAUGHING and look all SERIOUS and THINKY and like we were CONTEMPLATING THE FUTURE and some junk like that…Tim kept whispering things and I’d dissolve and Ray would kind of sigh, and smile, aaaaaaaaand wait for us to GROW UP A LITTLE @^*&@ING BIT…! (still hasn’t happened, but, well, whatcha gonna do…?)

Lots of things change. We’re both a bit…ahem…fluffier…than we were back then. We have our first round of Welcome To Aging crap; gray hairs, diverticulitis, interesting hormonal changes (I hates them), plantar fasciitis, waking up stiff and sore to face what seems like a truckload of therapist-recommended exercises for this or that Sore Bit, and a bewildering array of pills (wait…did I just take your hypertension thingee?...uh…am I gonna die…and if I am, is there time for coffee first…?), and oh yeah, speaking of, in desperate medical need of coffee.

Other things haven’t changed at all.

We still make each other laugh, really hard, really often. We don’t fight, or even argue much; whenever we get in danger of it, I walk away…and he lets me.

We still have tremendous respect for each other, for our individual and combined needs, for our strengths and weakness, too.

I still think he’s about the greatest thing ever.

Technically, he ain’t perfect or anything close to it; not going to be on the cover of Perfection Made Flesh magazine any time soon.

But he’s perfect for me.

And I still love him like crazy-mad. And still think I will for the rest of all time.

Even if he does have hair that is always about three seconds from going all goofy and stick-y-up-y.