TWENTY YEARS

Perhaps one of the most significant parts of December? Our 20 year anniversary! Two decades? In many ways I feel like I've been with Mike always, but also … I don't feel old enough to have possibly been married for TWENTY years! We were married just one day after I turned 23 so in three years we will have spent as much of life together as we ever spent apart. In any case, there is nothing old and tired about having been with him for such a long time. I literally find myself whispering prayers of just absolute THANKS for him all of the time.

And this pictures here. The kids could not stop laughing. 

Also, I love this little snippet from an email Abe sent me:

Lots of times when missionaries go to another house in interchanges or for whatever reason, they like to see pictures of the other Elder's families. ... [E]veryone is blown away by how muscle-y and tough Dad looks in all the pictures with his beard and everything. It doesn't translate as well, but they say things like "He's buff! Is he one of the Avengers? He probably knows how to terminate people." Another time we were listening to some audio file and it mentioned something about a troubled teen that got in a fist-fight with his Dad. They were talking about if they thought they could beat their dads, and said "But NOT Elder Harris's Dad! He's way too strong. We'd never last a second."

And, last of all, while I found no time to write up all the events of the last few blog posts in the ways that would have given me the most satisfaction, I did manage to make a little time to try and find some stumbling words to express some of what I feel about this marriage to Mike. I couldn't couldn't get it right, but I do truly truly love my husband. Here is what I wrote:

Mike loved me when he proposed of course, but it was a madly smitten kind of love. The incautious kind that once told me he couldn’t even “remember what [he] thought about before”. He certainly couldn’t have known then (nor could I have told him) that that intense infatuation wouldn’t be the end. Or even nearly enough. All it could really be was a hopeful little offering. A beginning (made mostly in naïveté) that couldn’t yet comprehend ... twenty years and ten kids later. And I’m not exactly sure how that tiny start has now set the pilings and secured the riggings over two full decades. But I do know, in grappling for some type of words to explain this, that the makeup of our souls seem to have actually woven themselves together — like literal cords of light wound tightly between us (the existence of which I can’t really explain or prove ... only feel certain of). I feel stretched and uncomfortable even having him physically far. And it’s a lovely thing — having this happiness that so completely belongs to just the two of us.