Mornings

I'm madly in love with my husband all the time, but I think the time I feel most in love with him is i the morning before I leave for work. The alarm goes off and one of us hits snooze so that we can have nine minutes of half-asleep snuggling before I have to get up and get ready to go.

Once I've gotten dressed and washed my hair, if I have any time left (and I almost always do), I sit in bed with the laptop and read the news and get my mind in gear for the day. And while I'm doing that, Dave is fast asleep in the bed next to me, but even though he's asleep he'll reach out for me and scoot closer and sigh, and then all I want to do is put the computer away, turn off my phone, crawl back under the covers with him and hug him forever because I love him so much that it almost hurts my heart to feel it.

Le Sigh

The alarm goes off every morning at 7:10. This is so that we can hit the snooze button once. A man named John Saunders once devoted three or four pages to describing the delicious half-asleep feeling of knowing that you have to get out of bed soon, but also knowing that you don't have to get out of bed yet, and being awake enough to enjoy it but sleepy enough to still be cozy and warm.

All of that is true, of course. The best part of the whole night is snuggling under the covers while the alarm is snoozing.

The problem is, eventually you can't hit snooze anymore. And then I'm sad, because all I really want to do today is stay in bed with Dave (who is burrowing further under the covers and making sleepy grunting noises next to me while I write this). I want to stay in bed all day and then get up around maybe six or seven, get some dinner, and then come back home and go upstairs to watch House on our neighbor's TiVo at eight.

Sadly, the only part of that which will actually happen is the bit about House, which is going to be rad, but really was the least attractive part of that whole mental picture.

Instead I will go to work, and I'll have fun and I'll feel good about it, but most of me will be lying in bed asleep next to my husband, who I love more than anything, feeling warm and cozy.

Oh well. Maybe tomorrow the stay-in-bed-all-day fairy will like me better.

Thoughts

I've spent the last hour or so in the kitchen, scrubbing pots, scrubbing counters, and dealing with rancid food that didn't get cleaned out of a pyrex dish soon enough. Let me tell you, rotten curry is NOT a good smell. I also cooked spaghetti for my lunch. By the time I was done with an hour of running the hot water and boiling more water in a pot, the kitchen was so hot that when I opened the freezer to get ice cubes out, the clouds of "steam" that poured out of it were so thick that I couldn't see.

These are the things I learned today:

• When my kitchen is clean, I feel dramatically better about life in general
• It is always better to wash things immediately after they get dirty, especially if you are OCD and prone to minor panic attacks about touching mold or rotten food. (You'd think I would have internalized that one sooner. Sorry, mom and dad.)
• Cooking isn't as much fun when it's only for me
• If you don't like pears, but you buy them for your husband and he eats all but one of them and then loses interest, eventually that lone pear will start to rot, until its insides liquefy and turn into something that smells very much like vinegar, and looks very much like maple syrup. This will drip out of your fruit bowl and onto your cutting board, and you will feel stupid when you finally find it under an avocado and realize that that's why you can't get rid of the fruit flies in your kitchen. Ew.
• Housework is much better when, upon its completion, you can flee back to your air-conditioned bedroom

This is what God is teaching me about marriage, love, and dying to self: that I, who hate making beds (especially beds that are merely a mattress on the floor and are up against a wall), will make the bed when I get up, not because I was asked, but because when my husband comes home from work tonight, I want him to have an inviting place to lie down and rest.

For we are bound by symmetry

We're getting married in three weeks. Twenty-one days. Less than a month.

I wondered if by now I'd have had any second thoughts or felt nervous at all about the prospect of being married to Dave forever.

The answer is no.

I was cleaning out some old files and came across a whole host of photos taken between early 2002 and mid 2004, almost all of me, all at college. I used to have a lot more, but they were stored online and lost as I either forgot passwords or websites stopped providing hosting services. I wish I'd been better about keeping track with them. It's strange to look back at all those photos (I took a lot) and remember everything associated with them.. who I was dating at the time, what color I'd dyed my hair, what classes I was taking, what my favorite clothes were.

I miss college (the first attempt) a lot. I miss all the potential, and having not made as many stupid mistakes, and the friends who were never more than a five minute walk away.

But in three weeks I'm going to be marrying the most wonderful man I've ever met, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life with him, and there's nothing in the world that I would trade for him.

I heard a song tonight by the Decemberists, one of my favorite bands. One of the things I like about them is their unbelievably beautiful lyrics. So, I'm including the song, for your listening pleasure, because it's got some lines that are so sweet they make me want to cry.

Three more weeks, and I can hardly wait.

This is the story of your red right ankle
And how it came to meet your leg
And how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangled
And how the skin was softly shed

And how it whispered “Oh, adhere to me
For we are bound by symmetry
And whatever differences our lives have been
We together make a limb.”