Twelve Years

Drawing by Chris Van Dyke. *

Today marks our twelfth wedding anniversary. When I stop to think about how long that is, how much we have done and seen in our own lives and how much has happened in the world in that time, I am amazed. When we got married, Google didn't exist. Neither did iPods, or YouTube. Iraq was the country we went to war with when I was in elementary school, and Afghanistan wasn't on the radar at all. Since then, we have moved from college in Walla Walla to Bellevue to Texas to Bellevue (for a summer anyway, but it involved driving both ways) to back to Texas to western New York to Arkansas. We have both completed graduate school, adopted three cats, a dog and a chinchilla. Bought a house. Grown (or tried to grow) hundreds of tomatoes. Played hundreds of games of racquet ball; traded racquet ball for tennis. Read thousands of books (I am not kidding. Until this past year, I read about 100 books a year - combine that with all the reading we both did for graduate school, and multiply times 12 years...) Had a baby.

What hasn't changed? The fact that Benjamin is still the person I want to be with every day, the person I want to see the world with, the person I want to grow old with.

*If you like this picture and want something like it for yourself, Chris is available for commissions. Check out his page here.