We Have the Rest of Our Lives

When I wrote about our wedding day on this blog I said something about how wonderful it was to be loved for all my ordinary attributes, for all the small and simple things that make me fundamentally and effortlessly me. 

The irony in this is that our relationship has been anything but ordinary. 

 

I met him when I wasn't looking. I was focusing on me, on bettering myself, and healing from past hurts. 

But getting to know him felt so much like healing that I couldn't say no. 

So I said something else. 

 

"I'm moving to the East Coast." 

 

I wasn't sure of it until I said it in that moment, and I couldn't take it back after that. Until I said it out loud it was only an idea, a thing I saw faintly in my future, like a light I knew was coming.

 

He said, "That's okay." 

 

And somehow I felt it too. 

 

  

 

We had a matter of months together. As friendship became love, I felt shaky and uncertain when I was alone and my brain overthought and complicated matters. But there was something about being with him that simplified things, something about the way he quieted my fears.

 

But things got complicated fast when he left to go back home for good this time. 

I found myself crying on the way home from the airport. But somehow I never once felt scared that this would end things between us. 

The only problem was that things had barely started, and they were already becoming more difficult.

The rest is a bit of a whirlwind. The rest is something I still struggle to wrap my mind around, that still makes my heart feel like it needs a chance to catch a breath. 

 

We counted months apart. Across more provinces than years, we followed one another. 

 

At some point we were apart for more months than we were together. Then that changed again and we were together for more months than we were apart. 

 

Now I see him every day. 

 

Somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern that made my thinking problematic. Instead of thinking about the fact that we made it, that we are building a real life together in the East Coast, something which seemed so far when we counted the days till we'd see each other again, I started counted the things we'd missed out on. 

The distance robbed us of a few things, and so did the pandemic. I feel like I have been trying to catch up ever since.

 

I have felt this overbearing desire to make up for those missed experiences, the milestones we had to skip, or the phases we had to jump ahead to. 

A relationship that started off so simple and natural became too real too fast. It felt like we had to decide on forever or on staying apart. In the end it felt like we chose forever in a hurry. 

But that doesn't bother me anymore.

 

 

We did a few things backwards. Then, two years after a wedding in the midst of the first lock-down, we finally had our honeymoon.We went away, to an unfamiliar place, surrounded by strangers, in no ones company but each others. We walked on foot to another country, spoke with foreign ducks, and played mini-golf. We drank champagne in our hotel room as the sun went down.

 

We might have missed out on things, but, in the end, its not the missing that counts. Its how we grew, and comprised, and made things better; it's how we did things we never knew we would.

The milestones come even when their unanticipated, even when you don't realize that you've passed them until you are looking back and see how far you've walked together. 

 

 I'd walk anywhere with you, the short way or the long way. I'd take the detour; I'd walk the steep road. 

I'd walk all the way to France with you, or cross the bridge to Luxembourg to have dinner by the river.

 

Wordly

I have found my writerly self in the world. I have been away from home, and come back to the same conclusion. 

 

The world is overwhelming large, and it would take many lifetimes just to discover how vast it really is. 

 

 

 

There would be so much adventure, and no time to come home. There would be so much to see, and a whirlwind of contemplation that never gets to settle in. You could delve into the city, but there are so many more through which you'd want to wander. You could map every wood, and come back next summer just to see it changed. The landscape changes when the sky does. The earth changes with the weather. Each city has a season with a separate face.

 

And when the night rolls in, and the life grows thin, the traveler would realize that they have only scratched the surface of a sea of secrets spaces, unexpected castles in an ancient wood, an ocean brought to life a hundred different ways just by the way the light shines on it; a still stone wall with a murmured story; a river laced with legends. The world is speckled, scattered, sowed and sprinkled, strewed and swimming with things to surprise you.

 

The wind carves out artifacts, but it stashes its favourite secrets under sand and stone. 

Nothing on this earth is really are own. 

We are simply here to try, in our small human way, to take it all in. 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been away and I have realized that the only thing I can do when the world astounds me, takes me away, makes me ache inside, gives me the urge to run away, is write about it. 

Everything else simply won't suffice.

 

 

The Day of the White-Out

 Writing Ghost Stories during a White-Out

The world was a ghost of itself that day. The trees were ghosts. The building across the way was ghostly through the snow. 

I spent it mostly in my chair by the window, looking out of it from time to time, wondering how much paler the world could get.

 

 

 

The stuff came down thick as cotton, like fluffy rabbit tails, getting caught on everything it happened to touch. The tree outside my window was laden with fluff. The cars out-front disappeared under it, frosted over into hibernation. It filled up the world, disguising the town around me.

 

You forget you live in a town on those days. No cars come by. No people wander out their doors. Paths and roads get lost on those days, and all the town's people go missing under the weight of snowed in rooftops. We all live under ground on those days, like happy moles, the world and the wind barely remembered. 

 

I watched as the wind pack snow onto my windows all throughout the day. It was the most literal snowing-in I could imagine, and it thrilled me. I could faintly see the tree that stands just outside, bare limbs scratching, waving lonesomely.  

 

It thrilled me because I thought my chances were higher this time than the time the streets flooded whilst I stayed home and edited my book. This time wind and sky and snow were banning together, I thought, to build a snow-fort around me. In the morning, all I'd see is the close winter, pressed against the glass of every window, refusing to let me out, letting little in besides a faint impression of light, weakly melting.

I would not complain, not about the mountain on my front steps, too much for one shovel to muster; I would not mind about the car which has gone missing somewhere in a driveway which has equally disappeared. 

We can go dig out the world later.

 

I can go anywhere on the white page. And, though the white winter world is gone and distant, the ghosts on the page are more tangible than the cold seeping through the glass, just so long as the storm lasts. 

 

Still, my windows were only partly covered when the dark settled in, as it comes in winter, somehow softly, touching everything evenly. You look away, and then the day is over, and you bring out the candles and pretend the night will last forever so that the snowday does not end.

A lifetime of snowdays should me enough for me, I think. Books depend on snowdays, after all.

    

 

 

In the meantime, I will sit here in my snowfort through the school days and the times when cafes close. They will start to wonder where I went. They will forget where the front door is.

 

But sometimes in the dark a wanderer will dare the winter, and if they come by the snowfort which has a house under it, and maybe a lonely tree, they might see a light glowing faintly from somewhere under the snow and they will know someone is still in there and that they have not run out of candles. They will know someone inside is still awake, writing in secret.

 

For now, I would like the time to edit. I would like the days to fill themselves with winter, so I can stay snowed in. I would like to stay in my snowfort, safely forgetting that I live in a town, and not inside a book. 

 

Two Cups of Tea and One Book

What strange and mysterious things ensue, I do not know. But I found that one cup of tea quickly led to two as I read this afternoon.

 

Meanwhile, the day changed its course countless times, drizzling onto my window just to let the sun slip out for a while not long after. Then, later that evening, it started to snow sparsely. 

The day sure was eventful, and I found, though I am a quite a few chapters in, I still don't know what to think of it. 

 

As one test led to another, and I watched quietly while each of the three very resourceful children passed each obstacle differently, brilliantly, strangely.  

 

I half expect Lemony Snicket to come slinking out from some corner where he has been silently watching and admit, as if to make a point, that not even he knows what is going on and what all this could mean. 

 

 

The book begins like most of this nature do, with something strange stemming from some adult thing, like business trips, or moves to new homes due to financial struggle. More often than not, it is an uncertainty in an issue of child custody. This one begins with something even more adult and mundane, an ad in the paper with these inquiring words: "Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?"

The words are also printed on the back cover in red letters. 

One should note two things about this statement: first, it is addressed directly to a child, not the child's parents; and second, it slips in the words gifted, and special, which every child wishes to be.

 

 

These words are less strange on the back of a book than they would be printed in the paper. 

But I imagine any child (or adult) would be reading this book for the same reason they would note the ad in the paper with keen interest.

 

I am, of course, not a child. But I was unfairly not allowed enough time to be one, and so, I often like to read as if I still am one.  

The world is far more mysterious and whimsical when you are young and unfamiliar with issues of custody or financial struggles. A child is less likely to question the premise of a book, no matter how mysterious, just so long as it intrigues them or allows them the chance to be gifted and special, which admittedly, not only children wish to be.  

 

Perhaps by the third cup of tea the part of me that still reads in the voice of Lemony Snicket (or rather, Jude Law) will have a better sense of what is going on.

What We Found in the Woods

2019: We went for a walk in the woods, you, me, and your family. The sun was out, and the snow was glistening. The trees were bare, though I could feel that in the warm winter air they were beginning to awaken. As we whisked through the forest, waltzing amongst trees that stood like sculpted pillars around us, something mystical occurred. 

Maybe it was the way the sun was shining, like a romantic sort of photograph in which the sun ignites the world with a flare, with sun-specks or sun-spirals or sunny-streaks that shimmer in your hair. Maybe it was the way the forest floor was frosted over with snow, like a ballroom floor glimmers below crystal chandeliers. Something about the way the trees whispered of spring and the way the earth smelled of change gave me a breath of something that felt like certainty. 

We came to a river, frozen at the foot of a gorge. Your mom told me about your childhood, about picnics and the way the trees had since changed. You told me that a lot of your stories took place here. Maybe that is what made the place feel so nostalgic; even though I’d never been here before, there was memory here. There were little versions of you running through the trees. 

I too grew up in the woods, running through trees with dirty feet and feathers in my hair, searching for adventure like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys; storing secrets in tree-trunks and looking for the entrance to Narnia or other lost realms.   

Forests have a weird way of appearing timeless even as they change. We both grew up in forests of our own, forests that we mapped and memorized, forests filled with the trees we climbed and memories of us as bare footed summer children, our noses sprinkled with freckles and our heads crowned by the sun, fancying ourselves the kings and queens of our forest kingdom.

It wasn’t then, but at some point in time my forest and your forest aligned. It occurred to me then, that, as I prepare to leave my forest behind, I wouldn’t so much mind moving into yours.

 2021: We went for a walk through a different wood this rather warm winter day and I was reminded of this piece I wrote almost two years ago. Me and my husband were only just dating, and I went to visit him over the break. It was the first time I met his family, the first time we started talking about what our future would look like. 

I decided almost on a whim that I would move to his province that summer. Sometimes I wonder if we would still be married now if I hadn't.

But that is the way adventures go, is it not? Occasionally a whim strikes us, almost like a childish desire to run away to live in the woods, but much more serious. 

All I knew then was that I was restless without him, and that home was where he was.

    

Spending Time in My Printed Book

I have spent the last few months inside the first few chapters of my book.

Part One, which I wrote so long ago, in another province, in a house now far gone, in a time and a life so unlike this one, is a thing of my past. 

I have spent these last few weeks revisiting it, sifting through its words, righting its tilted paragraphs, rummaging through its pages like sheets of music that need organizing. 

First, they were untouchable, black on a white glowing page, easy to erase and alter, to mend and mistakenly correct. All I had to do was press the keys. 

Then, a few weeks ago, they became concrete. 

With the help of my family, Part One, written one summer when high school was done but my new life had not yet begun, was printed now for the second time. But with it came something new; something more hefty and more full of change; something written by a writer so unlike the one who spent more time deleting than she did writing; a writer who somehow learned to write so effortlessly, she almost believed she was doing something wrong. 

 

Thus, Part Two was printed for the first time. The book in both parts was bound by twine and many helpers, as we sliced and organized and punched holes. It had to be bound in three parts, due to its length. 

Furthermore, something both small and great happened: the book was printed with a name. For the first time since I first started writing it, this book that was mine had a title wholly apart from its former one ("my book", a unfitting title altogether, since it will not always be mine.) I always knew it would need a name in order to go out into the world. But I never thought it would come so easily.  

 

But this copy in its incompleteness, in its messiness, with its notes and scribbles and its curled edges, will always be mine. So, as I toil with it, as I get frustrated with it, as I hop across its shortcuts and try to find new ways to write about things that to me are by now old and familiar, I learn that what I love most about this printed being is to hold it, to feel how much it weighs, and remember what it was like to fill out these pages when they were digital and blank. I knew it as the printer coughed it out, and I picked up the pages, and all I could say was "I wrote all of this!"

But, not only did I write it all, I worked for it all; I fought with it all; I got fed up with it; I hurt for it; I lost sleep for it. I wrote every word.

 

Now I get to think about it; I get to fix every fragment and cut up every run on. I get to ponder each word and select some new ones. I get to cut and paste and alter. 

 

So, as I edit Part One for what I hope will be the last time in a while, I resist the urge to rush to the end, to the new stuff yet unread, wholly unedited, but full of tension, and mystery, and murder, and so much more. I resist the urge to call it good enough, and I ponder with my pencil these now printed words. I cross things out. I jot things down. I think about unfinished paragraphs when my mind can wander during long work days.

I tell myself that I do not know when I will be returning here next, to these chapters written before the beginning had yet begun. 

I do know this though: when I return, I will be a better writer than I am now; when I return, I will have written chapters I still know nothing about; I will be one step closer to the last one, what ever numeric title it may bare. I know that it is out there, somewhere on the paper white horizon. 

I know also that the next time I read these chapters I will look up from this book, this book that is mine only for a time, and the life around me will be different too. 

It is strange how thoughts like these affect me: making me both eager to get to the end, and desire to linger here a little while longer.

Stuck Editing in an Imaginary Fishbowl

I was reminded of the scene in Big Fish in which Edward Bloom is engulfed by a rain storm. Within seconds of the storms beginning, his entire car is immersed as a lake gushes from the sky, equipped also with fishes and the ethereal woman who we've learned is also a fish. What follows is a scene of tranquility. In the ghostly underwater world, Edward sits in his car like in a fishbowl and watches the strange fish blow bubbles around him. 

I, however, was not in my car, and it took at least the whole night for my house to be engulfed to the brim. The rain had been driven onto my window all night. Eventually though, it sounded less like raindrops and more like a waterfall. I could hear the tree crashing against the side of the house as the tempest thrashed away with it.

I spent most of that night editing, usually forgetting the gloriously nasty weather outside. I had a candle by the window, and from time to time, I pressed my face to the glass. I could see almost nothing outside. It was dark, and my reflection peered at me in the black. I did not see any fishes.

Believe what you will, but moments after this picture was taken, a trickle of water leaked through the frame of the window and put the candle out. 

 

I admit, I am never quite sure where the time goes when I'm writing, and after a night spent imagining things, it is always strange to come back to the real world. By the time I return to my surroundings, it is usually pitch black outside, and there being no street lights where I live, there is nothing out there to see by. 

 

All I had was the sound of the outside world to spur my imagination. I could hear the rainstorm pounding on the rooftop; I could hear it running down my windows; I could hear the waterfall outside our door gushing wildly; water; water; water. It didn't seem to stop nor lessen. 

 

As I tried to fall asleep, I listened to the trickle leaking through the top of the window, and I imagined what might be going on outside. Then sleep came, and with it silence. And still the water trickled. 

I slept there, in that tranquil lake.

 

 

I was saddened when there was no lake around my house in the morning, and so, I had no choice but to go in to work. The ditches and dykes I passed on my way were flooded, but beyond that, I had no proof of my strange night. 

 

I suppose fiction can only be incorporated into one's life to some extent. I'd imagine myself into Edward Bloom's fishbowl any day, if I had the choice. There is less to do there, and so much more time to write.

Stoker's Shadows

 "Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches crashed together... It grew colder and colder still."

(Dracula, Bram Stoker)

It was a cold, blustery day; the cold was of the wet, bitter kind; the kind that seems to grasp your very bones. Not even the heat indoors could fight it away. You could feel it seeping through the glass of every window. 

 

 

The outside world looked dreary, blurred by the wetness and the damp, and the rain's slim slippery fingers tapped on my window eerily, sometimes almost desperately.

 

By the time the afternoon rolled in the day had changed its mind tenfold, turning itself from rain to snow, and back to rain again. By then the clouds above were as thin as a dying person's skin, and the light it let loose was pale and meagre. 

 

The day was almost spent.

As I read by the window, the shadows crept out from between the pages of my book, out of the core of its very spine. Even as I held it open, transfixed by its horror, still, the shadows lingered. I expanded its leaves, extending its spine and wrenching it wide. Still, the shadows deepened.

 

 

 

 

 Dracula was made to be read on days like this: when all through the afternoon the light weens to grey; when the imminent dark of November is only hours away, and even the crook of a spine is a dark and shadowy place. 

 

The Night Before Halloween

Writing Horror on Halloween

 

It was the night before Halloween on which I sat up late, editing a scene which I'd written many moons ago. 

It seemed to get dark earlier that night, and the only thing that was to be seen in the windows was the reflections of the candles I had burning within. 

 

 

Ironically, I wrote about the darkness too. In the scene in which I dwelt that night, there was no light to see by. But, if there is not sight to write about, the writer's pen takes up other senses. The touchless dark has no surfaces or scents. But sounds it has aplenty; sounds to make the imagination go wild, conceiving apparitions, fabricating frightful fancies. I forced them all onto the poor soul who had wandered into the pitch darkness of my scene. 

 

I paused. 

It's dangerous to live this way, I thought, to be so immersed in the page before you that you do not see what goes on around. Anything could happen when the writer is so engrossed in the fictional; anything at all. 

People might be peering into their windows; a cat might creep by through the flickering shadows; a raven may call on the tree just outside. 

Would the writer notice?

Probably not. 

 

Its dangerous to live this way, to take up one's laptop and sit in a chapter all night, neither seeing nor hearing what goes on behind you, or underneath your chair. 

Better not look, that's what I say. It'll only distract you. It'll only give you a fright. 

 

And what goes on in the night is better left up to the imagination. 

Turning it Around for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is always brighter when reflected upon, or when seen in pictures afterwards. 

 

We entered this same forest last year, but the sun was not shining then like it did now. Last year the forest was a fairie one, full of moss, and little mushrooms and tiny timid snails. The dainty webs of spiders were bejeweled. Little streams stole through the leaves then, creeping through the crannies on the ground, barely heard. We hopped over them last year, trailed them, tapped our booted-toes in them. Last year this forest was undiscovered, unwoven by our trails, every bend a mystery.

 

Not this year. This year, the sun was shining, and the leaves were painted, like I'd always dreamed I could paint them with my messy oil pastels, bronzed and bitten, flushed and florid; as if the trees themselves exhaled a sigh, blissfully remembering how wondrous the summer has been.

 

 

This year the sun warmed the leaves like pie; this year the world seemed illustrated, like a picture book that stretches through the hundred acres. This year we were no strangers to the forest, we knew which trees to pass. There were no streams to hop, but there were roots to tip toe across. This year two kitties waited back home for dessert to begin (instead of just the one); this year, our family was a little bigger.

 

 

But there are some things these pictures cannot capture: Like how that same morning the skies were bleak and grey and I did not feel thankful at all; how we fought first, then thanked. 

But then we got dressed in fall colors, and we drove to my mom's house, and there it smelt like cinnamon, and apples, and cranberries, and warm turkey, and all the other fine delicious things you read about in books about holidays or critters that live in a red wall.

 

 

 

 

 

Fall gives such magic, and this year it gave me an even greater gift than timid snails and bashful streams over which to hop. This year fall gave me time; time to drive home in this golden kingdom after turkey; time to taste the tender goodies only a mother can bake; time to walk with my dad; to snap pictures of my brothers; time to fight with my husband, and fall asleep in his arms that same night.

 

 

Another Year of Bilbo Baggins

It has been a busy few weeks, as the weeks of September never fail to be. But in all the new things that are only just beginning, and all the old things we are returning to, it is important to celebrate the ancient traditions, like the birthday of a likewise ancient Hobbit.

Indeed, of all the reasons to eat good food, drink cheap ale, watch one of our favorite movies, and just have fellowship with one another, in our books, the celebration of Bilbo Baggins birthday is one of the best. 

 

To another year.

Three Worlds in a Day

 

"What had seemed to be lost was to be restored to her tenfold."

 

~A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

We read all that Sunday, till one book was finished and another begun. We read all that day, till the sun went down and the night lights turned on. 

I lived in three worlds that day, in the world of a fanciful child thrown into hardship, and then into the legends of Arthur through the short lived tale of an incomplete story. And then, when that was over, I peered over your page, and lived in yours.

Writing in the Rain

Everyone has got their muse. Mine just happens to be the rain. 

 

 

 

I don't know how this really started. I just know that one day I convinced myself that all the best things I'd ever written happened on rainy days. 

Over time, I have come to rely on it for that; that when the rain comes, the scene will get written, the chapter completed, writer's-block beaten. 

 

Occasionally something good will come to me on a sunny day, but it takes a dedicated kind of focus and a calmness of the mind to bring me there. That being said, all my sunny-day-scenes tend to feel more peaceful, sometimes sad. Rarely are they of the same kind of impact or vitality as the things I write when it rains. 

 

Writing in the rain has its upsides and its downsides. It's both erratic, and reliable. 

When it doesn't rain for weeks on end, I feel as desperate for it as the earth around me. I feel parched, dried up in my creativity, like the thirsty plant shrivels. 

And yet, when the clouds come over me, I know that today I may write again. It always rains eventually, and when the drought ends, so does my writer's block. 

 

Over the years, the metaphor has only become more perfect. How sporadic rain can be. Just like inspiration, it sometimes comes when you least expect it, or don't want it at all; when you have prior engagements and you have to chose to either duck-out and feel guilty for missing life, or miss out and feel regret for the words that might have been written. Inspiration waits for no one. And the storms don't plan their schedule around me.

And so, I plan around it, when I can. I look at the weather forecast and make excuses on days when I want to slip away; do nothing but listen to the tap of the rain on my window and the click of my quick fingers typing, nothing but cross empty pages, showering them with curled letters, little dotted words that drizzle and then drench into paragraphs.

Ah, yes: the rain, it comes like a river. 

But then there was a day this summer when it rained so much, buckets filled and spewed over, saplings drowned, every dirty window for miles was washed clean, and all I could do was sit and look, and watch the rain fall. I don't think I wrote more than a page that day. 

 

 

 

 

I don't know what the lesson here is, other than that maybe there's a balance to everything. Just like words don't always come when it rains; just like how, a few weeks after that rainy day on which nothing was written, I wrote the best scene I'd written all summer on a hot humid day; in the same way that long busy winters always give way to rich and rain-full summers in which so much is written, writing comes with ups and downs. 

Rain and sun, inspiration, depression. Sometimes it rains, and words fall like a waterfall. Sometimes there are other things to do, like to sit and simply watch the rain fall. 

 

When it comes down to it, I'm a writer on rainy days and on sunny ones; I'm a writer in winter, and in summer, whether I'm writing or not. 

For all of these things are part of it, you write, and you live, and then sometimes you write some more. And occasionally, all it takes to be a writer is to sit and listen to the rain fall and let your keyboard be still.

 

 

 

An Evening on the Lake

Rainy afternoons sometimes give way to the calmest evenings. On this particular night, I found myself within the realms of a pastel painting. 

My husband took me out onto its horizon.

 

The colors shimmered on the water. Soft tones of blue and pink rippled as he took me out across the narrow lake. 

 

 

Through the pastel world we drifted. And yet, I took as many pictures of him as I did of the water. My, was he a sight to see. 

 

 

 

 

Next, he took a few of me, as the world turned blue beyond.  

 

 

 

 

But the sun wouldn't stay, and so, slowly, the colors slipped away. As the blue darkness swept over the water, my husband rowed us back to shore. 

 

 

 

 

The colors grew dim, but for an instant we were painted, picturesque and still.  

So the pastel painting faded into black just as the lovers left its rim.

 

 

  

 

God is an artist. I believe this as surely as I believe in Him.

Rainy Days at the Cottage

It rained at least once each day while we were at the cottage. On this particular day, however, it rained for most of the afternoon into the early evening. After a brief swim in the rain, I slipped into some dry clothes and curled up in a chair with a book.

 

 

Eventually I got so sleepy that I snuck upstairs to the loft where we were sleeping. I awoke to the sound of the rain still pattering on my window and the sound of the trees quivering.

 

Nothing gives me such a deep and comfortable peace as rainy days like these.

Take off to Ontario

Last Thursday I didn't know we would be flying to Ontario the next day. 

We booked our flights at 11:30 at night and packed our bags. Then, after 4 hours of sleep, we headed to the airport. 

I've always wanted to pull off a spontaneous trip like this. Of course, we couldn't have done it without all the people who accommodated their plans for us.

It is now more than a week later, and we are back home and safe in quarantine. I'm still not sure how we pulled it all off, but I'm so glad we did it. What a crazy wonderful time we had.
 

Wedding Day

Who thought that getting married could be so simple!

Even when everything could have made it anything but easy: between the pandemic, the postponing, the uncertainty, the struggles, the waiting! But when we finally decided to just go for it, I knew it would be perfect! (Thats a lie, I knew it would be perfect - Nat)

Nathaniel, you make everything easier. Even when its complicated, even when its hard, or chaotic, or awful. You make life simple.

I always thought meeting the man I would marry would be transformational. And it was.

I also believed getting married would be such a big deal. And it is.

But it's also been far simpler than I ever realized.

It's simple because you love the simple things about me. Even though I used to believe that the person I'd marry would love me because they find me extraordinary, I learned from you that its much greater to be loved for the simple things about you. You love me because I'm ordinary in my own way, and that means I have don't have to be extraordinary; it means that you love me even when I'm lame, or irrational, or boring, or stubborn. You love the things about me that I don't think twice about, like how round me face is, or how dorky I am.

How grand it is to be loved for who you are when you're not trying; the things that stay when you are at your worst; the things that are fundamentally, ordinarily you. 

You reason with me when I'm unreasonable. You make everything seem doable. You make my simplicity my strength.

 I love the simple things about you. I love your humor. I love the way you love. I love the fact that my family loved you from the start. I knew you were the one when my Opa and Oma loved you when they met you at the airport; when my grouchy cat came to sit on your lap even though she never liked anybody, least of all strangers. I knew it when saying yes made far more sense than saying no. I love the way you play with my brothers, ever since that spring in Manitoba when it suddenly seemed like they were your brothers too.

I love your spontaneity, the way you run into the bushes, hop over streams, take me out for pancakes. We used to joke that we didn't go on dates, we went on adventures; and if dating you was an adventure, I can only imagine how grand it'll be to be married to you.

Let our life always be simple like this. Because when everything is wrong and life is a mess, the simple things keep us going: like cuddling up to you, laughing with you, grabbing midnight snacks with you, getting tickled by you.

How far we've come already.

We've followed each other across three different provinces. We've had adventures in new places, and faced countless changes. We've said goodbye way too many times, and counted too many days apart. We've built a new life out of pieces of our old ones and made it uniquely our own.

But in all the challenges we've encountered, you've always been there, at the end of the day, the wonderfully, extraordinarily, most fundamentally simple thing about my life.

And no matter where we go, and no matter what happens, let it always stay this way.

Oh, what a wonderful wedding day.

~ P.S. ~

Thank you to every one who tuned in to watch us get married from afar and supported us even though you couldn't be there! You filled our hearts with joy!

Thank you to those of you celebrated with us, and those who are patiently waiting for the day we can finally celebrate together! We await that day with such excitement!

Thank you to my brothers for making the day possible, for helping to run our wedding day and filling it with treasures!

Thank you to my new siblings, for your advice and support!

Thank you mom and dad for making our wedding perfect, even though it wasn't the way any of us ever thought it would be! (We got married in your backyard, even though it wasn't the one we intended and imagined all these years).

And finally, for the future, thank you to my new mom and dad for your support from afar as we eagerly await our wedding to come, in your backyard this time ;)

We hope to see you all soon...