A Lifetime Commitment
A
wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership,
tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. ~Paul Sweeney
We celebrated our anniversary Sunday with a big party, but yesterday was actually our anniversary. So we went out to eat and to a movie. Big time celebrators, right? Maybe that fun anniversary trip will be in the future. After all, you don’t hit one of these kinds of milestones in life often. Both my parents and my husband’s parents lacked a couple of years celebrating 50 years together. One of my sisters did see her 50th but at the time her husband was fighting lung cancer, a fight he lost, and so they didn’t feel like celebrating. My other sister lost her husband before they were married 50 years.
It’s not an easy milestone to reach, but it helps when you start as young as we did. Way too young! But things worked out and here we are all these many years later, still married. Still smiling, most of the time, the way we’re smiling in this old picture. This is the first picture we ever took together. We were at an amusement park with a church group and ducked into one of those little photo booths where you put in a quarter (I told you it was a long time ago) and got a strip of four pictures.
I didn’t know they still had those booths around, but last year when we went to the Louisville Zoo for the St. Jude Walk, there was a booth like that. Takes more than one quarter these days but the kids still had fun squeezing into the booth and taking their picture. As you can tell from the old picture of my husband and me, we were having fun too.
A long marriage is two people trying to dance a duet and two solos at the same time. ~Anne Taylor Fleming
We’ve
been married a long time now. But we’re still walking down life’s road together while pursuing our own dreams too. Enjoying the blessings. Facing the hard times. Finding our way through life. Being thankful for the gift of a beautiful family.
Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. ~Simone Signoret
That’s
how life goes. Many threads of life connecting us. It’s the same with a
book when I’m writing. I have to come up with those threads of life to
make my story and people come to life. Of course
I have to give my characters plenty of hard times because while happily
ever after might make a good ending, happy times the whole book through
won’t keep readers interested. We like it when the fictional characters in the books we read dream big, overcome problems and reach their goals. You know what? We want the same for ourselves and our friends and family.
Hope the threads connecting you with your loved ones this week are threads of happiness.
I’m sure many of you out there have celebrated milestone anniversaries. Ten years. Twenty-five. Forty. Fifty. I knew a couple in our church who celebrated 75 years together. What did you do to celebrate?