Our Anniversary

Nate,
To me, you will always be Red Robin because that is where we met. Notting Hill because it was in the theater watching that movie that our hands first met. The white Tacoma pick up truck that I drove in high school because that is where our lips met. The Indian chair at my old house on Satellite Dr. because that is where the sound of your "I love you" first met my ears. The McCully House Inn because that is where we got to know each other in ways we don't talk about on blogs. And the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center because that is where we first met the perfectly formed product of that one time when two of our tiny little cells met. But in the more recent DayToDailyness of our life together, you have become many more places and sounds and smells to me...

You are the smell of Listerine mingled with Zest bar soap on a good-bye kiss from my favorite set of lips every morning at 8:15. You are political podcasts, religious discourses, The Millionaire Mind, and Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover through the ear buds of a white iPod Nano. You are marginal benefits, arm's length transactions, and cost benefit analyses--a fiscal metaphor for most of life's issues. You are the best, the worst, the funniest, the most embarrassing, the most delicious -- superlatives for every description. Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But your enthusiasm for life is usually boundless and always unfeigned.

You are the beeping of the cell phone alarm at 7:00 a.m. And again at 7:10. And 7:20. Until the inevitable cannot be postponed any longer and there is finally a groggy emergence from the warmth of our king-sized cacoon at 7:30.

You are a seemingly infinite internal capacity for chips and salsa. You are Blue Bell Great Divide Ice Cream sandwiched between two homemade chocolate chip cookies. And unfortunately you are a wretched intestinal revenge after a gluttonously greasy evening of burgers and bottomless steak fries at the local Red Robin.

In domestic affairs, it has emerged a sort of unspoken agreement that in our home, you are the broom, the lawnmower, the weed-whacker, the pesticides, the fertilizer, and the iron--and I am happy to be everything else. You are the food on our table, our mortgage payment, the gas in our cars, our insurance payment, our electricity bill, the clothes on our backs and the furnishings in our home and I am the frozen smoothie fruit, the accessories in the bathroom, and a few other occasional niceties that a part-time nanny's wage will afford.

You are a navy blue pair of BYU Athletic Department jersey shorts, which remind me that the man who runs gentle fingers through my hair in the wee hours and lays on the floor of Henry's room when sleep won't come, used to run pass routes around refrigerator-sized linemen, and raise and lower astronomical amounts of steel in a testosterone-infused weight room. And you are the residual traces of that strength I feel when you willingly work the knots out of my back where stress settles in a grip of fiery tension right between my right scapula and my spine.

You are the HubbaHubba! compliment, "Wow, Sweetie! You look HoT!" when I straighten my hair, apply more generous amounts of make up, or wear a flirty skirt. But even more charming, in my opinion, is that when I'm clad in green plaid pajama bottoms and a sloppy t-shirt, in a fresh from the shower, lazy Saturday morning state of make-uplessness, you are the, "You're really pretty, do you know that?" observation, offered in a genuinely I'mNotExpectingToGetLuckyTonight kind of tone. And while we're on that subject that we don't talk about on blogs, I can't resist revealing that you are a hearty round of armpit flatulence (y'all know the kind, where you place a cupped palm in your underarm and make crude noises,) -- a failed attempt at aphrodisia, but a brilliant dose of unexpected humor during a tedious stint of trying for child #2.

Silliness and stupid human tricks aside, you are constant affirmations of my brilliance, my beauty, my goodness, my wit, my independent worth. You are unfailing assurance that if given the chance to choose again, you would choose me. Over and over again.

You are a six foot tall, one hundred and ninety pound, slightly off-pitch singing, usually cheerful, always loyal, very hygienic, most dynamic, daily reminder of the wisest decision I have ever made.

Happy Anniversary, Nate. Here's hoping for an eternity more of marriage that is as sweet and soul-stretching as the past four years have been.

I love you "con todo mi corathon," (wink!)

Em