Nine Years Ago Today

Nine years ago today I married my best friend. Officially, with a minister and a crowd of people and all the trimmings that two twenty-year-old kids could afford. (Surprising most, our wedding cost less than $900, considerably less. Dress, cake, flowers and the like were made and borrowed by and from family. The reception hall was bartered for (would have been $400). I'm not sure where the money was spent exactly. I know we paid for staff to serve the punch and cake and clean up. My bouquet was real. I paid for the children attendant's clothing and my bridesmaid dresses.....ok, you get the idea.) It was a beautiful, stunning, made people cry wedding. In the middle of a blizzard. Most people that could come were those within walking distance of the gallery. Luckily, my out of town relatives were staying near by and the rest of our invite list were neighbors (neighborhood art gallery/theatre was our location). The minister and piano player were both neighbors too.

In retrospect, I think that the reason our wedding ceremony felt so intimate was that these people were not strangers or distant cousins or work acquaintances- they were instead the very people that we lived in community with, who would be supporting us through friendship and as mentors in our first (and many) years of marriage. The minister sensed this and used it in her sermon. (She also wrote it into our vows, and so we promised, never to hang wallpaper together. Never have.)

Marriage is hard work. We've had some good and bad times. This last house restoration tested us in ways that we could not foresee then. What got us through was luck, hard work, and each other. Those people who promised to support us back in 1999, really have- even though we moved from that community in 2000 across town.

I began this post intending to write about us as two teenagers in love, me with purple hair, an English major and Dear Husband, a punk rock skateboarding drummer- but really our marriage is more than an evolution of two people sharing lives. It is a tribute to those who support us as well.

How far we have come, how far we have to go. We are blessed to make the journey in good company. :)

3000?!?!

Wow. 3000 visitors since I started tracking in September. That just amazes me. I have about 30 regular readers for each new post. I'm not sure if that means rss feeds. I was so nervous about blogging and it is just so mind boggling how easily I slipped into this community and felt comfortable.

Here's to 3000! WOW.

Final Release

"Consider the lilies" is the only biblical command I have ever obeyed. --Emily Dickinson

So, through this all I may have sounded like a neurotic mess. Perhaps. My total perspective vortex swirls with my inability to see things in their context, ie. I tend to magnify the little things out of proportion and hang onto them them longer than is good.

So what next?

What comes after release?

Embrace.

Embrace those I love, the life we have chosen, the path we are happily stomping and dancing on.

Take it slow.

Consider the lilies. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin.... (Matthew 28).

That same section of verse also talks about how you cannot serve two masters and love them both. Indeed. Mine are clear. My family and my career. I realize that I've craved an external label to give me self worth: architectural historian, curator, professor.....and somehow forgotten the simple but powerful: mother, wife, sister, friend. A job does not define who I am, I do. Love does.

That's why I love the Harry Potter series so much: love defines the hero, is his super power that defeats all evil. In the end his simple act of fretting over his young child's worries, his fatherhood, demonstrates the subtle and powerful ways love manifests. Some people hated that ending, while I saw it as a shining tribute to the entire series. They don't say what career he ended up in, just that he is father and husband and friend. Those are the roles that matter in the end.

So for me, I need to embrace my life and not cringe away from it, not hold myself to impossible standards, and just like the lilies.....in all weather, dance and play and grow.

Here's to 2008 and all the wonders it holds!

Release: Part 6, The House

This one is really tied up in Identity too. For the past 9 years I've called myself the Mistress of Hatton House. The house restoration was my thesis and the reason I went to graduate school, the reason for my involvement in the local movement and government. It has been the only thing I talked about, my ice breaker, my lecture topic, my example.......my portfolio for assessment.

I am releasing all of that into the hands of strangers? Preparing my house for sale has been a heartbreaking, gut wrenching process and one I wonder if that inner ego of mine isn't sabotaging the effort. The house is mine, so shall another be. I do not belong to the house. It is a large gracious house, but a needy mistress in constant need of attention and care.

Since moving here, my non-fiction prose abilities have flourished but my poetry all but disappeared. I stopped painting, drawing, and colouring. All creative resources I had mentally and physically went into the house. My thesis was completed but the manuscript was not: it is stalled out and I know why. It's a long, hard goodbye. A novel, one chapter from completion.

Something changed when Lil'Bug came into our lives. The new form of our family became our story. What a grand adventure! I realized that the life we had been living was in no small part tied to my childhood hurt......thoughts went swirling- the happy part was on a farm. I loved living on a farm! Driving to a rural campus over landscape that touched these memories, that's when the dreaming began. Then I whispered it to husband. That whisper took hold of us and it is what we are actively working towards. It will be easier to say goodbye once we are closer to that goal, I imagine. Part of me will always be the Mistress of Hatton House......