5 Year Anniversary

Leif and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary last weekend. Amazing to think it's been 5 years... alot has happened over that time, both good and bad- but all of which has made us grow as individuals and as a couple.

On our wedding day, Pastor Dianne shared with us the following reading; and we read it quite often and know and feel that our days together, do truly keep getting sweeter:

It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well motivated. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love. Young persons think love belongs only to the brown-haired and crimson-cheeked. So it does for its beginning. But the golden marriage is a part of love which the Bridal day knows nothing of.

A perfect and complete marriage, where wedlock is everything you could ask and the ideal of marriage becomes actual, is not common. Perhaps it is as rare as perfect personal beauty. Men and women are married fractionally, now a small fraction, then a large fraction. Very few are married totally, and then only after some forty or fifty years of gradual approach and experiment.

Such a large and sweet fruit is a complete marriage that it needs a long summer to ripen in, and then a long winter to mellow and season it. But a really, happy marriage of love and respect between a noble man and a wise woman is one of the things so very handsome that if the sun were, as the Greek poets fabled, a God, he might, now and then stop the world and hold it still, in order to feast his eyes on such a wonderful spectacle.

Theodore Parker (1810-60)
US clergyman and reformer