Anniversary

Today is our fifth anniversary (the anniversary of our relationship as having started via a romantic phone call on October 13th 2008).  The traditional gift/theme for the fifth, is wood.  Coincidentally, today is also the anniversary of my cousin and his wife.  It is their twenty-fifth and the tradition is silver.  My girl is snoozing on the couch at the moment and I'm left to wonder what we might do tomorrow morning to celebrate the culmination of five years together.  The evening is spoken for as we will be traveling to the valley to celebrate my cousin's anniversary (ours taking a little bit of a step into the background).  After dinner and a bit of party-time with the cousin, Hannah and I will pick up a mutual friend and return to Post Falls for an evening of cake and, most likely, some scary movies.

I keep thinking about wood.  It is an interesting element to be attributed to an anniversary.  Of course, perhaps I shouldn't even be calling it an anniversary since it's merely a marker for for the time we began dating and not the date of our marriage.  We would like to get married, but until everyone in this country is allowed to get married, that isn't going to happen.  I know we could have a ceremony and say vows, but it reminds me too much of Rimrock Apartments when I was a kid.  We'd all meet up outside, all us kids, and go to the little dead end alcove between two of the apartment buildings which was definitely 'out of bounds' as it was blocked off by those stinky bushes that smelled sort of like sage and sort of like something else.  We would sneak through the tight gaps, decide quickly who was to marry who, and then stage a little wedding.  It was a fairly common occurrence; I was the bride several times, even the groom once or twice, and I was a very popular choice for the minister.  We would eat pilfered food from our parents' pantries.  I seem to remember Kellogg's Cornflakes.  And the berries off the sage-ish bushes.  We didn't eat them but we would squish them, throw them, rub them on our hands and arms as if it were part of our ceremony.  For the life of me I can't remember what the marriage signified which leads me to believe that it meant nothing.  I'm not going to extrapolate on this and say that marriage in general lacks all meaning.  No, the point of all of this is that there is a difference between a real wedding (and I'm using wedding in a broad term as we are most definitely leaning more toward a hand hasting ceremony) and a 'let's go through the motions for our friends and family' wedding.

I'm thinking about the wood again and thinking of the dowel mom bought to work as supports in the cake.  Hannah beat me with said dowel earlier today, thwacking my rump with it.  I'm glad I was wearing jeans; it could have been unmercifully distracting if I hadn't been.  What does wood mean?  It's the foundation of a house (or could be), and if you're the second little pig it's a false sense of security.  For me, wood is the forest and it's fire in a little pit encircled by rocks and soil.  It's divine in its construction and destruction.  It is scaffolding and it is the stake meant for a vampire's heart.  It is what makes it all possible and yet a creaky step in an old farm house can be the bane of superstitious person's existence.  It can bend, snap, burn, grow, die, branch out, polish up, fade, split and splinter and in all of that perhaps it is perfect traditional for two people coming up for air after five years of weirdness mixed with familiarity.  We've bent for one another, snapped at one another, burned with rage, burned with passion, we've grown as a couple, we'll die as a couple, we've branched out and someday, maybe, we'll branch out and start a family.  It's the split part that we've managed to avoid.  There have been some very close calls but just as faded wood can be revived with Old English so too can a blistering relationship be restored by sacrifice, appreciation, and lots of angry make up sex.