It was a spectacularly beautiful sunny June day.
I was sitting in a park in Tiburon across the bay from San Francisco looking across the water to the city. Alcatraz was in the foreground, and the bay was peppered with sailboats. The fog blanket was moving in over the Golden Gate Bridge on it’s way to cover the city. That day it resembled a dragon, stealthily gliding through the bridge cables to envelope the hills and waves and buildings in its path. It was the most awesome thing I had ever seen.
I had just arrived for a week-long girl’s trip through northern California, and I’d never had an experience like it. We were having a blast, and I was thrilled to be there.
But as I sat there, breathing in the cool crisp air, I thought, “This would all be so much more fun if Nick was here.”
And that’s the precise moment I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. I loved my life and who I was, but it had all gotten so much better once you were in it.
From the moment we met, you made me laugh like no one has ever made me laugh. (I’m not sentimentalizing. My old roommate once told me she always knew you were around just by my laugh.) Humor was a non-negotiable in my future spouse, and you have it in spades. It may seem shallow, but I knew that life being as unpredictable as it is and looks being as fleeting as they are, it was important to me to do life with someone who could find the humor even in the craziest situations.
Nearly 7 years after we first met, you still make me laugh like no one else.
But the laughs are different. For one thing, it’s not just me laughing anymore, but also our kids. Where we used to laugh about political blunders, setting up for parties, or the millions of times one of us said something and the other heard something else, now we laugh about diaper explosions, plans that fall apart, and the now billions of times one of us said something and the other heard something else
I think back on our first dates, our engagement, our wedding day. It was the absolute best time! And now? We’ve lost so much freedom and sleep and money from our bank account. We don’t live where we want to live, eat what we want to eat, or even do what we want to do. We’ve made choices since those carefree days that made everything different.
But they were all good choices. It’s so much better now, and through it all you still find all the things that are (not) funny and keep me laughing.
I remember when we were gathered with our closest family and friends the night before our wedding, and the toasts started. After each of our dads had a go, my uncle gave his. “My greatest wish for the two of you is that years from now you will look back on today as the day you loved each other the least.”
That toast seems to have been prophetic. We’ve grown so much and laughed so much in three short years, and I can definitely say that I love you far more now than I ever did then.
Happy Valentines Day! Here’s to all the things yet to come that will make us laugh and grow even more in love.
TOTAL W(H)INE 