The secret to life is finding joy in ordinary things." -Ruth Reichl
In my younger days, I expected wedding anniversaries to be magical.
I mean, weddings are magical, right? So I figured that if one is celebrating a day of magic, then something pretty darn good ought to be on tap for the festivities. Visions of second honeymoons and surprise parties danced through my head during the early years of marriage, though I figured I'd probably have to log a solid decade and get through the childbearing season of life before the glamour and glitz really kicked in.
I was expecting a diamond tennis bracelet somewhere around the two-decade mark, and certainly a Caribbean cruise by thirty.
But a funny thing happened along the way.
Life became a celebration of the ordinary.
Simple pleasures mean more to me now than flashy, grandstanding gestures, and while I'm certainly not against trips and jewelry, I don't need those things to make my anniversary special.
You know what I do need?
A big bunch of white flowers, just like my wedding bouquet.
A nostalgic dinner, featuring favorite foods from our reception menu and our pre-kid life.
A nice glass of red wine.
And a bit of reminiscing about the day we said I do.
Today we did a deep dive into the facts surrounding the bench-clearing Cubs versus Reds baseball brawl that erupted on TV on our wedding day while I was in my bedroom getting ready and sent my brothers into fits of hollering and catcalling as they watched from the living room.
My then-intended, safely ensconced in a hotel room across town with his soft-spoken family, missed the entire brouhaha. Thankfully, he has me to rehash the story for him every few years, because he always forgets these important details and I consider them a key component of our wedding day lore.
Because that's what wedding anniversaries mean to me now. Not a showy over-the-top spending spree, but a simple remembering of the delightfully ordinary life that two people have built together.
And ordinary lives, I have learned, are the most magical kind of all.
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