My Better Half

I had to borrow this quote from my sister Rivka.  Partly because it's so beautiful and partly because it describes my thoughts as I was going over our summer's activities, wishing our camera had been working when Michael and I were away celebrating our 12th anniversary.  In lieu of a pictoral recapping of a wonderful and much needed 4 day escape to Sunriver (where we snuggled, rode bikes, swam, stand-up paddle boarded on the Deschutes, read to each other, raced around on jet skiis, and refreshed ourselves and our friendship), here is my second on Kik's post as I reflect on our years of marriage:

"Walter Cotman always spoke of Mary as Elton's "better half." In spite of his sulks and silences, she would not go so far as "better." That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that she completed him, just as she knew with that same joy that she needed him and he completed her. How beautiful a thing it was, she thought, to be a half, to be completed by such another half! When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole? And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark."

Wendell Berry, A Jonquil for Mary Penn

Twelve years down, forever to go!

1982

July 1982.  Oh, what a cute little family...all except that chubby, stumpish little thing on the right.  What happened to it?  I love this picture!  I have fond memories of this period of my life living on Brown Deer and sneaking guinea pigs into bed with me at night.  Okay, back to slavery in the 1600s...

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves," and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all."

--C.S. Lewis

(Borrowed from my Pop's blog.  Always a good read!)

Gift for Daddy

I came into my room the other evening to find a nice little taped up jar on my nightstand with a note under it saying, "A gift of love for my dad.  Love, Clara."  Below the text was a picture of someone screaming with a spider crawling on their head.  Clara, knowing Michael's intense dislike of anything in the Araneae order, left it there as a little joke.  She extracted a promise from me that I wouldn't let her spider go until Dad saw it.  Okay, fine.

However, the joke was on me when I woke up the next morning staring into an empty jar, fine sticky webs from my nightstand to my pillow and headboard (which got in my hair when I sat up), a nasty little bite on my side that itched and hurt all at once, and the unsettling feeling that I had been snuggling with someone besides my husband during the night....

Clara was sad her pet got away, but delighted that he'd had such a fun and productive night, "Can you believe he did all that while you were sleeping?"

This wasn't the spider Clara caught, thank goodness.  This one was so big and nasty we were all forced to leave the dinner table to watch her eat her dinner.  Yes, that is a full-sized grasshopper she has there!  Michael kept a safe distance.