Day One

Day One.

All over again.

Day One once, then Day One again, and Day One thirteen times until today, the fourteenth Day One.

Today.  We start over again.

There have been a lot of days between those fourteen Day Ones, innumberable highs and lows, monotonies and memories, joys and griefs, all passing through the stream of todays and pouring over the falls into the lake of Life in the grander scheme, a Life we built together.

A Life we are building together.

Our marriage, our family.

I very much love this Life we’ve made, but I’m also thankful for a new Day One – a chance to take the best of the past and merge it with bright hopes for the future to make something even richer, more secure, more comfortable, more enlivening.  The days between our Day Ones have changed us; hopeful, anxious 21-year-old brides can only imagine what they already know, can only prepare for what they can already imagine.  That naivete to me is a good thing, because if I could have envisioned what some of those in-between days held, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to take the leap.  But I didn’t envision because I couldn’t imagine, and for that I’m so very thankful.

I lept.

I took the plunge.

And I would do it all over again – the Day Ones full of promise and the in-betweens with all their beauty and pain – for the chance to build a Life again with this man, the man I love.

Happy 13th anniversary, Tahddie.  I love you with all my heart!