Nine years ago today, and almost to the hour, two best friends exchanged their wedding vows. They vowed to be a home to one another. To sing to their children together. To forgive one another, and to let their love be stronger than any other feeling that passed between them.
Today they aren't together. He is pruning trees on someone else's property, while she attempts to study how best to help other people's families. Likely they're both thinking about each other, wishing they were doing anything but what they're doing right now, separately, under the same relentless grey sky.
Nine years, for those who still keep track, is the willow anniversary. Willows are remarkable trees, one of the few whose branches can bend impressively without snapping. Willows can teach us how to yield, how to grow in unlikely places, how to hold our sorrows without succumbing to them.
Here's to nine flawed and lovely adventurous growing-up years of the Js. May their branches diverge and the tree continue to grow, deep and wide and blossoming every spring.
