Married Life

One of these days, we'll get Mark to post something here, but, in the meantime, it seemed best to post an update on the past almost-two-months of marriage.

Married life is lovely. There's a deep truth to that phrase, "married life"--it's as if our individual lives, although threading along in closer and closer proximity to each other for the past number of months, have now begun to weave together and anchor in each other. And there's a simplicity in it. Almost daily, I find myself gushing to Mark about how perfectly easy it is to break from our work (we both work from home), sit down at our kitchen table, and eat a meal together . . . no matter how unpredictable our schedules are.

Furthermore, the balance of caregiving and need for care is easier to maintain with substantive bonds that bind us to each other. We have laid out for each other our needs and our stores of wealth and match them up, one to the other. This sounds like a solemn and meticulous process, but it is often in gleeful and giddy moments that we find we have sketched the blueprints of our habits and family traditions. (My favorite new "tradition" is a fall-specific game which involves long stretches of staring at a single oak tree interspersed with bursts of frantic hilarity as we both chase the same falling leaf. Whoever catches it gets a point. Mark won by one leaf.) These are the kinds of pleasures that I barely knew how to anticipate. They are delicate, nuanced, and sweetly mundane.

Now, I recognize that I tend to write in terms that tend towards the grandiose and metaphysical, and I also recognize that we've only been married for almost-two-months. I fully anticipate--hope, even--that our experiences will reveal to us facets of life we don't yet have the words to describe. But today is a part of our marriage as much as a day twenty years from now will be. It just happens to be the early part. So, we are thankful for the joy, and we carefully prepare for whatever else might be ours. And, to sum up, we are having a wonderful time of it.