World Enough, and Time

My wife and I will be celebrating our sixteenth wedding anniversary on the 29th of February. It has been a good sixteen years.

It’s been a good sixteen years despite my illness, despite my being on Disability for nearly four years, and despite my often being underemployed in the early years. It’s been a good sixteen years despite our families each having their own trials and tribulations, illnesses and surgeries, disputes, disruptions and divorces. It’s been a good sixteen years even though I drive my wife absolutely crazy in any number of ways.

In my youth I was always looking for fireworks and symphonies. I looked for the thunder crash and the artillery barrage, the big time, the big top. I thought love had to be epic and overwhelming. I have learned a better way in sixteen years of marriage. I’ve learned that the most powerful feelings are the ones the poets don’t write about, the ones that have the power and immensity, not of a storm crashing ashore, but of the long swell of the deepest sea.

What I have really discovered in the last sixteen years is that the years haven’t paled our marriage, that there are new discoveries every time I look into my wife’s beautiful brown eyes, that there is delight in the curve of her lips when she smiles, in the tilt of her head when she’s engrossed in something on her laptop. I have found that Andrew Marvell was wrong to fear the “deserts of vast eternity” when “beauty shall no more be found”.

Beauty is in my wife’s every movement, in her every breath. In sixteen years, there is no diminishment, only new facets to be discovered. And tomorrow, I know, there will be new delights.

I am a very fortunate man.