Love's not Time's fool

A couple of weeks ago, when I was at the lowest low of my vitamin D deprivation and my husband was bemoaning the cold rain, my lack of productivity and his lack of clean socks, I asked him why he bothered to stay. His answer was "because I love you." As if that was enough.

And, yet, it must be, because he's still here, hanging in with me through my life-purpose wanderlust (not to be confused with the upcoming festival, although doubtless related) and my domestic bulimia (trash the house for a couple of weeks, then spend the next two freaking out anytime something is out of place). His unwavering devotion as I reinvent myself daily and his support for my yoga practice, endurance training and racing and outdoor adventures, which he often photographs but in which he rarely participates, are evidence that love is not easily shaken.

William Shakespeare said it well in his Sonnet 116, which was read at our wedding by our best man, while wearing a hat with bells on it. Perhaps when a marriage starts thus, only love and insanity can follow.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although its height be taken,

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Today marks another year in our journey of shared insanity. Love alters not with each year of marriage, but bears it out even through a dreary Adirondack spring, a plethora of mosquitoes and piles of dirty laundry.

My anniversary gift to my husband is to drag him to Vermont, where he will get to sleep in a tent and entertain our seven year old while I join the yoga frenzy at the Wanderlust Festival. Hey, I got him a music ticket for Saturday, so he can join me for Michael Franti's performance (if we can keep our son up that late), so that counts. Doesn't it?