Happy
She took it all in and said, “I guess in the grand scheme of things, it could have been a lot worse.”
So I reached across the restaurant table and held her hand, matching my devil-may-care grin with her Don’t Even Think About It smile.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“…Please.”
“What?”
“Really, honey? Really? After eighteen years, you really don’t know how this goes? What I’m about to ask?”
[chuckling] “Oh.”
“Or would you prefer I came over there and got on one kne—”
“DON’T. YOU. DARE.”
Which of course meant that, before she finished the “DON’T” and was halfway into the “YOU,” I was already up out of my chair in front of the entire restaurant and down on one knee, holding her hand (very firmly because she was trying to yank it away). She was laughing. I was laughing harder. But I would have satisfaction and her hilarious embarrassment only made it all the sweeter.
“Will you marry me all over again?”
That’s the question I ask, the question I have to ask on every anniversary. I don’t know how I came up with it but it’s something like Contract Renegotiations, and it’s asked only after we’ve had enough adult beverages in us to glow a bit so we laugh more than we cry at the last leg of the journey. That is, the last year since our last anniversary. And there was din enough in the restaurant such that my explosive laughter at her answer (a Very Loud NO! lol) only added to the high spirits all around.
I sat back down, still laughing at her still laughing and noticed several smiling women in my line of sight trying to make sense of Did He Just Do Is What I Think He Just Did.
It was a great night. It was just between she and I. That is, the deeper conversation and the Honeymoon Is Quite Over And The Novelty Of You Wore Off Eons Ago…But Call Me Crazy, I Still Love Being Alone With You. (Or what I call Home.)
Go figure.
And the sweetness of all that is only fully appreciated if you pull back the camera and rewind several hours into our Saturday when we were cleaning the garage and wanted to kill each other outright.
I don’t know what it is in your marriage, but in ours? It’s the garage. If I had a nickel for every single time I went to clean the garage and it devolved into WWIII, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, VIX and X, I wouldn’t be rich…I’d be paying someone else to clean it for me so I could avoid it altogether.
But God in His infinite wisdom (somewhere in heaven I think I hear a Voice going, “Oh get a load of this one. Nutjob’s pawning it off on Me.”) has so engineered the deeper lessons we need into the shape of a 30′ x 30′ arena, fitted with a million bikes, spilled paint, a drum set, a freezer and an extra fridge, a tool bench that looks like it sustained a direct hit and enough camping equipment for an army.
I won’t go into the details of how the argument started, how it peaked, how it exploded, imploded or resolved (but it did). I will, however, go into how, after it had simmered down, Cute Redhead poked her head into the garage, risking a whole other round, and said, “Could you come here? I really do need your help on something.”
So I drop what I was doing, head inside and follow the sound of, “…down here,” which was the laundry room. Which decided to imitate Niagara Falls in the form of a flow of water coming out from under the washing machine.
Which wasn’t even on.
It took Male Limbic Brain .087 seconds to register all of this and just .00000087 seconds to turn around and just walk out.
Unable to Make It Just Go Away, I maneuvered the washer and the dryer out of their positions to see what was Not Going Right and discovered something neither Cute Redhead or myself knew: that there was an actual working faucet with functioning hot and a cold handles…going full blast and dousing the entire wall behind both, the floor, the sides, the top, the splash splash splash [expletive expletive Very Bad expletive].
In a moment we realized that the leaking we’d been noticing over the last year or so was not an eventual and upcoming disintegration of internal parts requiring a new machine (which bums me out because we want a new set but can’t exactly justify it now), but Hidden Faucet getting turned on every single time Whirlpool decided to do the Charleston and dance across the floor because the spinning drum had all subtlety of an afflicted water buffalo delivering triplets.
Faucet off. Crisis averted. Mystery solved.
And then we looked down and saw where all the socks actually went and what Nature spends time concocting under laundry machines. Not pretty.
“You need to take a picture of that,” She said.
“What we need is to tie a chain to the back of this room and yank the whole thing into the street.”
“Well…I guess in the grand scheme of things, it could have been a lot worse.”
I looked at her.
I thought of the garage, the fight, the argument, and the eighteen years so far.
I had to laugh.
Happy Anniversary, honey :)
Beautifully written as always. Glad the sock and leak mystery got resolved.
Thank you Veronique!
That sure looks like more than the expected wayward items there, Todd. Me thinks someone’s hosery was instigating a revolt and called in the reinforcements.