Old Age Day by Day March 30, 2012

We're off this morning for our anniversary weekend getaway.  It's overcast, threatening rain, just as it traditionally is on our anniversary.  This may be heavy symbolism, but I prefer to think of it as an unwise decision of the time of the year to marry.  Of course, we're both impulsive enough that not much planning went into the day, date or anything else.  We were moving to a new town and parked outside the flat we'd just rented and my husband said we should get married, and a month later, we were.  There were 17 people at the wedding, including my two toddlers and our friends two toddlers.  We had a reception in my parents' back yard, and I wore a bridesmaid's dress I'd found for forty dollars in Macy's.  The food came from a deli and we picked out the clothes, cake and everything on the Saturday before.  I wore a dotted swiss old fashioned Austen kind of dress with pink and green flowers and a pink hat with a green ribbon.  My husband rented a tux.  We found the gold band at Target.  We had no honeymoon, because we were worried about leaving the kids, they were so young and confused about the whole enterprise.  We wanted to begin our new life in our new town married, and we did.  It happened to be spring, and although it was sprinkling on and off that day, we managed to have pictures under my parents' cherry tree and not much sogginess.  We had not considered that the next day would be April Fool's Day, but I kind of like that idea.  What is marriage?  A lot of surprises.  It took us 16 years to have a honeymoon, and by then we had two more kids.  A friend took care of our younger two, as we had taken care of hers, and we flew to Paris and Nice.  It was magical, and our tiny hotel was next to the Chanel Boutique, and every morning we glided by models in black smoking.  Very strange and wonderful.  The cliche "life is what happens when we're busy making plans" is too true.