Happy 49th Mark

Well, the best-laid plans and still a week goes by with no verbage. That’s the nature of a farm diary, is my guess.

Today marks the beginning of my husband’s last year in his 40s. Wow. He was a young pup of 32 when we met and now he is truly, officially, almost 50. 50! How did that happen???

Our life together is so full. We so often laugh about the elasticity of time – in some ways, it seems we met just a few weeks ago, but in others it’s hard to even recall who we each were before we got together. And we both led very full, interesting lives before discovering Us. Mark had spent a year traveling through Europe, another three months exploring India and Nepal. He’d already been through a couple careers and several serious girlfriends. I’d moved all around the U.S., tried the Acting thing, very nearly sued a major American university, was half-way through a graduate degree,
and was just about to fill out my application to the Foreign Service. Not to mention had lived with and bought a house with a Very Serious Partner and had convinced my best friend to move 2000 miles with me on the possibility it might just change her life (it did).

So, we weren’t sitting around navel-gazing and wondering when our True Love would show up so life could begin. And yet. And yet, it is hard to discount the feeling of disconnectedness that those memories bring on. The Before life just feels like it belongs to a close friend, not to me. Like a movie I really enjoyed and watched over and over, less than my own experience.

Anyway, we’re getting old. Which I keep reminding Mark is better than the alternative. You’d think a person who has bested cancer twice would feel this intuitively, but the mind is a funny thing. Mark was complaining of being old when I met him (17 years ago June 1) and I kid him that eventually these neuroses will prove true.

And today has not been the most celebratory of days. It started with yesterday, when I tried my best to give him a birthday “do” because tonight was going to be so crazy. First, I tried to take him out to dinner, but he eventually decided he really didn’t want that. Then I asked what he’d like me to cook, which he figured out pretty quickly, only to have the day end up such that I went to milk Tammy’s goat and he ended up making his own birthday dinner. Then, today, he’s had one giant work crisis after another to the point that our slick hand-off evening plans around Dylan – where he met me at the site of my meeting and he and Dylan went off to baseball practice and milking – got thrown under the bus of him staying late at work and translated into Dylan coming to my meeting with me and us all arriving home around 8PM. Happy Birthday!

But, I did manage a little gifty here and there so at least he knows we’re thinking of him and loving him. Hard to do too much of that.