Love officially started for me at my friend’s church.  When I was 14. 

My friend had invited me to a harvest party, and I was only too thrilled to discover that someone like him was there.  I fell for him immediately.  Maybe it was the enormous leather high tops.  The pegged pants.  The over-sized turtleneck and hair-covered neckline.  But maybe it was far more than that.  Maybe it was just him.

Two years later we were dating, moving excitedly from friendship into romance and working earnestly to figure out how to “be” with each other at church now.  Do we act like we’re dating?  Do we pretend we’re just friends?  How do we keep from making our church friends uncomfortable?  That’s when Bonnie Raitt’s Something to Talk About became our song.

Yesterday was our ninth wedding anniversary.  Can you believe it?  Nine years.  To celebrate we bought Raitt’s Best Of CD and cranked it up on our way to a rendezvous in San Francisco.  The setting sun spilled orange over everything and as Bonnie belted out her soul, we reflected on life and love and all we’ve adventured through in the last decade.  Appropriately, on this day of commemorating “us”, we even got ourselves into the driving/navigating tension we predictably do when we’re trying to find places we haven’t been to before.  Life is so real, no?  And wonderful.

N, I love you.  I love you more than words can communicate.  These last nine years have been the most beautiful, challenging, adventurous, comforting, life-changing, life-sustaining ride.  There isn’t a soul on earth I’d rather have done them with than you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 17th, 2005 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Mindfulness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.