As anyone who knows me can attest, I spend
a lot of time recalling and documenting the past. My past. The past of our family.
Some couples I know share quite a long history together.
While in some ways it seems like Jim and I have been together forever,
and I mean that truly as a positive statement - in truth, we don't share the same past. When I talk about "
back in the day", we were sharing those days separately, except for the past ten years.
A decade holds a lot of precious memories and amazingly a decade goes by "just like that".
Our girls,
our daughters, were just little children when we first got together. They are now all young women. It's just crazy when I think about how fast the time has gone.
Today is my dear Jim's 54th Birthday.
You're welcome, dear, for me mentioning the age; but honestly we are what we are and it becomes more and more, just a most peculiar number.
You are the only person I've
ever known who has a Christmas Eve Birthday.
I hope that I've done a good job over the years of focusing on your Birthday celebration instead of Christmas Eve events. You'll
never find a birthday gift wrapped in Christmas wrap in this house. NO WAY. We respect the wonderful December birthdays!
When I spend time looking back at our pasts, I find it interesting that we lived the majority of our life without each other in these separate lives.
I've often wished we could have known each other then.
Then,
when we were young.
I've wondered,
would you have found me attractive back then?
Would we have been interested in one another? I wonder what it would have been like knowing you then and I stare at these old photographs in curiousity and mystique.
Of course, we'll never know those answers and although our first relationships didn't work out, good things came because of them, and against all odds, we somehow met, while living in two separate countries, hundreds of miles apart.
This box holds all the physical contents of those early days together... cards with mushy terms of endearment (that I
adore) and faded photo prints from one of our first meetings from a now, non-existent e-mail box.
But I honestly don't have to look at the physical remnants to recall the great passion or shared interests. In the words of Robert Browning, whose poetry we shared those nights, now a decade ago....
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!
Happy Birthday, darling.
I love you. Your, Linda
