Boy, nothing says, “Happy Anniversary!” like spending the day prepping the outside of your house to be pressure washed.
Yay romance!
We sure know how to do it up right. Moving garbage cans. Carrying off potted plants. Trying to figure out why every stick my daughter brought home from vacations is stacked up on our front porch. Along with every stone, every shell, every rock and what may be either a large chunk of coal or something way more toxic. Either way, it could use a pressure wash. We left that outside, then went about shuffling and moving before relocating a platoon of cold-stunned lizards who couldn’t believe we had the audacity to uproot their lives.
“Can’t you just celebrate an anniversary like normal people?!?” they seemed to say.
No, actually I don’t think we can.
It was the luck of the scheduling. How you never think about how much there is to get ready for a house project when you schedule it, or that it might leave the bulk of the work for a big day.
Whoops!
I mean, it wasn’t one of the BIG anniversaries. The ones that end in a zero or a 5.
This was our 23rd wedding anniversary. Traditional gift: silver plate. Modern gift: rubber chicken. General excitement level: Did we really just schedule pressure washing the day after our anniversary?!?
OK, so 23 years isn’t monumental. But it’s still big. Once you hit 20, everything is a little bigger. A little more remarkable. People start to see you like the circus sideshow guy who gets so many plates spinning that you are completely amazed, but also wondering how he is going to keep it from all crashing down. I mean, he can’t keep this whole sham going forever, can he?
I’m fairly certain this is what people think that about me. Twenty-three years? That dude is one mis-placed pressure wash away from sleeping in his car and brushing his teeth at a gas station.
Could be right. But 23 years is a pretty long time, and I’ve made it. We have made it. Oh, we’ve had our moments. What relationship hasn’t? But I’ve never been happier. And it was an exciting milestone.
Besides, working on the house for our anniversary somehow seemed fitting for us. Our married life kind of started with this place.
We had bought it just a few months before we tied the knot in March of 1998. To say it was a “fixer-upper” is to mistakenly imply it could be “fixed,” or that it had a lot of room to move “up.” A downtown St. Augustine cottage or bungalow of sorts, it had a kitchen sink sitting on 2X4s, heat provided by a potbelly stove and the kind of aesthetic that screamed, “this place would be perfect to shoot a slasher film!”
It was also one dead critter away from condemnation. But we said, “Yeah! This is what a dream home should look like. It’s charming. Let’s start our lives together here!”
I do say, something about us was never quite right.
We bought it, fixed up as much as we could and moved in as we planned our upcoming wedding. We were just three years out of college, had my young brother-in-law living with us, and if I remember correctly, were just rolling in dough. I was busy making tons of money as a freelance writer. (For those of you who have never done it, “freelance writer” is the human version of “fixer-upper.” Another synonym for it is “deadbeat” or “rotten fish.”)
Boy, we had the world on a string. But there’s something about being young and in love that you have no realization that you’re closer to bankruptcy than you are to hitting the big time. And you just don’t quite care.
I look back on it now and I think those were two dumb kids who thought they had it all figured out. Meanwhile, I think there was a raccoon the size of a bear living in our attic. Forget financial ruin, how did rabies or tetanus not take me out first?
Somehow we managed. We put this house into shape. We launched careers. We bought nice things. We went places. We must have made some money along the way because we can now hire pressure washers. We brought the most amazing daughter into the world. We brought chickens into the world. We gave a decrepit porch cat a place to live. We’ve spent 23 pretty amazing years together in this 100-year-old house that suddenly looks kind of “fixed up.” And it does seem amazing that we made it this far. But it also seems just about right.
We never take the easy way. It ain’t always perfect. The timing sometimes sucks. But that’s kind of life, isn’t it? And makes it a little bit different, but a whole lot of fun.
I guess it wasn’t all drudgery and house work. The day before we had gone for a hike at Ravines State Gardens. And after the pressure wash-prepping, we sat down to a charcuterie board of prosciutto and manchego cheese with a nice bottle of wine. A little bit of romance to cap the momentous occasion of 23 years. A time to think back, remember and even dream up new plans ahead.
Until I realized I missed a cache of hiking sticks on the back porch. Then it was back to work.