Boy, nothing says, \u201cHappy Anniversary!\u201d like spending the day prepping the outside of your house to be pressure washed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yay romance!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t believe we had the audacity to uproot their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCan\u2019t you just celebrate an anniversary like normal people?!?\u201d they seemed to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No, actually I don\u2019t think we can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whoops!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I mean, it wasn\u2019t one of the BIG anniversaries. The ones that end in a zero or a 5.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was our 23rd<\/sup> 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?!?<\/p>\n\n\n\n OK, so 23 years isn\u2019t monumental. But it\u2019s 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\u2019t keep this whole sham going forever, can he?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Could be right. But 23 years is a pretty long time, and I\u2019ve made it. We have made it. Oh, we\u2019ve had our moments. What relationship hasn\u2019t? But I\u2019ve never been happier. And it was an exciting milestone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides, working on the house for our anniversary somehow seemed fitting for us. Our married life kind of started with this place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We had bought it just a few months before we tied the knot in March of 1998. To say it was a \u201cfixer-upper\u201d is to mistakenly imply it could be \u201cfixed,\u201d or that it had a lot of room to move \u201cup.\u201d 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, \u201cthis place would be perfect to shoot a slasher film!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was also one dead critter away from condemnation. But we said, \u201cYeah! This is what a dream home should look like. It\u2019s charming. Let\u2019s start our lives together here!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I do say, something about us was never quite right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201cfreelance writer\u201d is the human version of \u201cfixer-upper.\u201d Another synonym for it is \u201cdeadbeat\u201d or \u201crotten fish.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Boy, we had the world on a string. But there\u2019s something about being young and in love that you have no realization that you\u2019re closer to bankruptcy than you are to hitting the big time. And you just don\u2019t quite care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve spent 23 pretty amazing years together in this 100-year-old house that suddenly looks kind of \u201cfixed up.\u201d And it does seem amazing that we made it this far. But it also seems just about right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We never take the easy way. It ain\u2019t always perfect. The timing sometimes sucks. But that\u2019s kind of life, isn\u2019t it? And makes it a little bit different, but a whole lot of fun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I guess it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Until I realized I missed a cache of hiking sticks on the back porch. Then it was back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Boy, nothing says, \u201cHappy Anniversary!\u201d like spending the day prepping the outside of your house to be pressure washed. <\/p>\n Yay romance! <\/p>\n 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\u2019t believe we had the audacity to uproot their lives. <\/p>\n \u201cCan\u2019t you just celebrate an anniversary like normal people?!?\u201d they seemed to say. <\/p>\n No, actually I don\u2019t think we can. <\/p>\n 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. \t<\/p>\n Whoops! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[578,561,557,563,566],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-nutshells","category-family","category-getting-old-er-older","category-houses","category-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2218,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions\/2218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}