I pass the smiling faces for weeks, maybe months, and never see them. Back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, I glide or tip toe or clomp hurriedly in an attempt to get wherever I am running late.  I am always running late, it seems.

Today, I stop in front of the faces anyway. I smile too; I can’t help it.  The memory of that night always makes me smile. The faces belong to new lovers standing in front of a lapping ocean on the sand. The sunset behind them seems like a backdrop, for it is too beautiful to be real. But it is real as is the chilly, salt air and the fog horn and the camera pointed at them. 

Theirs is new love. It is the kind that makes one’s stomach flip whenever the other enters a room.  It is the kind that with most couples lasts a year or two or maybe three then fades when the ether of lust evaporates.  Not so with these two.

As you may have guessed, the picture is of me and my husband, Jay.  It was taken on the beach in Hermosa nearly ten years ago. Today we both have more gray hair and wrinkles and fewer uncrowned teeth, but the love and even the lust are stronger than they were when the photo was taken.

I am always aware of that, as is Jay, but perhaps we are more aware this week. This week six years ago we exchanged wedding vows. One, one, two three…November 23 is an easy date to remember. That is the also the date when, eight years ago, I underwent surgery to remove a tumor from my heart. Perhaps you can appreciate how important Thanksgiving has become to us. Next month ten years ago, we’d gone to coffee for the first time.

This night and every night since the first night we spent together, we went to sleep embracing and awoke smiling, we called one another several times a day and left love notes and cards hidden around the house.

Those of you who’ve had difficult relationships need no pep talk to understand the blessing we have.  You also understand what joy there is in simple things, in being liked, not just loved;  in not driving the other crazy when leaving the keys hanging from the car door in the Mall parking lot; in being encouraged to develop friendships separately; in knowing your partner operates from love instead of fear.

Last Saturday I moved the picture of us from the kitchen to the living room and washed ten years of dust off the frame. When I pulled the photo out to do so, I noticed its edges had begun to yellow from age. It struck me that it, like us, is getting older. Something inside me sighed when realizing I loved looking at it more, not less because of that.

So my sweet husband, this is my love letter to you. My gift is your promise to chase me around the house every day when I’m eighty. Though there are so many reasons to stay with you for a lifetime, I’d do it if only to collect on the bet.