Last week, my husband and I had our 41st wedding anniversary. Before the big day, I Googled the proper present to mark the milestone. Most websites said there was no traditional gift for such an anniversary. But one, The Knot, said that while there is no traditional gift, the modern present to give the happy couple is … drumroll please … land.
Land? Please. Our 10 acres is more than enough, thanks.
Other websites said the 41st anniversary is the “iron” anniversary.
Iron? Like, the sturdy frying pans I use nearly every day? How uninspired. Who makes this stuff up, anyway?
Last year, during our 40th, we hosted lunch for our family and some friends. When people asked, I made it clear that I had absolutely no theories to explain our longevity, other than stubbornness.
This year, Pete and I raised our coffee mugs to one another in a morning toast and went about our normal tasks. I went to my barn office to write, he went to his fields to do more planting and weeding on the farm.
Honestly, we didn’t even exchange cards.
Not so long ago, though, we had a conversation about love that underscored the practical nature of long companionship.
I said that I knew he loved me because, when I told him once that I liked raspberries, within a day or two he planted two dozen bushes that produced the delicious fruit within six weeks.
To me, that’s love.
How, I asked, do you know that I love you?
“That’s easy,” Pete said. “You make me breakfast every day.”
Raspberries and eggs. Better than iron, certainly.
The day of our anniversary was quiet. Pete cooked a lovely salmon dinner. I cleaned up afterward.
Later that week, I left on a business trip to Ohio. It was the typical hideous flying experience that has become all too common. I got bumped from one flight and put on another.
Coming back, my flight was canceled entirely, and I was put on another flight that would have me arriving at my home airport at 1:30 a.m. Home by 2:30 a.m., if I was lucky.
I was annoyed, but the airline employee in charge of rebooking was kind. “Hey,” she said. “This is our plane that needs repair. We inconvenienced you. So if you want to go somewhere else this weekend, I’ll book it, and get you back to Hartford in a day or two.”
I was sorely tempted.
But the next day was the weekly farmers market. I knew Pete could do it alone, but … it is easier, with help, to put up the bulky tent and take it down, set up the tables, load and unload the veggies and wait on customers. I found that I wanted to be there to support him. So, I shook my head and said I would take the flight that would arrive in the wee hours.
I got to bed by 3 a.m., woke up at 7:15 a.m., and helped Pete with the market. Later, I took a nap, happy I had showed up.
And that is what marriage is supposed to be, really. Showing up — for each other.
While flying home, coincidentally, I read an essay on marriage that delighted me. Titled “For Better and Worse,” the author, Lynn Darling, wrote of how stunned she was when, on their first Valentine’s Day as a married couple, her husband gave her … towels. She wept. She was furious, horrified. What had she done? She had married a man who was, she wrote, The Kind Who Gives Towels. Yet the gaffe became part of their mythology as a couple.
Afterward, she wrote, every Valentine’s Day, her husband gave her towels. And she always laughed.
I will close with this, Darling’s most eloquent paragraph. It comes even closer to describing the essence of long companionship than planting raspberries or making a daily breakfast:
“It is a Sunday afternoon. My husband and I are playing Monopoly Junior with our daughter. Chet Baker’s trumpet fills the room. I hated jazz when I was single, but now our marriage is steeped in this music, in the ways I have changed and the things I’ve come to know, in exasperation and elegance, in the poetry of dailiness, in the solace of each other’s company. I see the ways my husband saved me, the ways I saved him. There is still pain in the phantom limbs lost in the making of this marriage, but in that moment the loss seems a manageable part of the trade. I see only the courage and kindness that marriage elicits, not the cost, and it seems to me that it gives us our only chance to be heroes. I want the song Baker is playing never to end.”
Congratulations on 41 years! My wife and I will be celebrating 54 later this year. It just keeps getting better. We are both oldest children and each of us is used to having our way. This inevitably leads to lengthy discussions, but we are confident in the love we have for each other. The outcomes are always worked out to each's satisfaction. I love the raspberries idea. I will suggest that she gift some to me for my next birthday.
Oh, raspberries! And gold ones at that! I've never seen those. I have lived my life around many long marriages though, and I suspect they would echo your thoughts on showing up for each other, no matter how tough it is. My longest relationship was relatively new, when I heard a dump truck pulling in the driveway. Wondering what in the world I ran outside, and there was my guy, dumping 10 yards of dirt that he had screened and cleaned for me, to build my Masada ramp from the driveway down to the garden instead of the awful broken steps. Gifts are what we are given when we least expect them. Congratulations on a long and successful marriage!