Today is my twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. Mine and GJ's.
It honestly doesn't seem like that long, but we have an eighteen year old man-child to prove most of those years have been time-served...
And I spent much of last week at home, covered in grime and dust, packing memories from childhood into boxes, and sorting through the things I shall keep and others that need to be kept, given, or even thrown, away.
Clearing your parents' home is cathartic.
Painful, but cathartic.
Clearing your own home is sometimes necessary!
I'd put off doing things for a time, many months when I was very fearful of not ever fully recovering from my back injuries, added to with unresolved grief after the loss of my parents...
I guess I'm in reflective mode today.
My husband has stuck with me throughout all of this.
He is strong, and sometimes also quite a vulnerable man...
Together we've experienced so much: Side by side we've been through thick and thin, sudden family loss on both sides, nail-biting crises, debilitating illness, torture, turmoil, debt, unemployment, moving house eight times, separation because of work, long periods of constant worry about our son and school and whether we were doing the right thing, varicose family horrors, and our own personal turbulence -- We're both pretty strong personalities, neither of us gives in easily...
It's not always been easy.
Living together with another person never really is, I think...
You make accommodations for each another. We find excuses; Filter some of the truth; Prop one another up; Make each other cups of tea...
In sickness and in health.
For richer for poorer.
For better, or for worse...
Some of us make it this far. Some of us don't. There's nothing wrong in that.
But this is our 24th year. Celebrated today.
And I'm grateful to him for continuing to hold me together, sometimes he puts me together, piece by piece.
At least I'm grateful to him some of the time... ;)
Quite a lot of the time, I'm thinking about how to go about laying a patio that I can bury him under!
