A dozen years of bliss

[Flori] Yes, it's true. We celebrated 12 years of marriage at the end of December. We have always talked about growing old together and it's starting to feel like it's really happening! The girls surprised us in the early morning by making us breakfast in bed (cold cereal and toast). They even got Bea out of bed and fed her a bottle before waking us. It was a great start to a wonderful day . . . playing legos with the kids, drinking hot chocolate, watching 'The Secret Garden'. Rob and I celebrated that night with a cafe dinner, a movie (National Treasure 2), and a treat at ColdStone Creamery.

Some things I love about Rob:
his sense of humor--he still makes me laugh a lot. He's a terrific dad and house helper. He likes to pretend he's heartless, but he is completely soft when it comes to his girls. He indulges my weakness for pretty things and buys sentimental gifts for me. Really, it's hard to explain all the little things that add up over the years and all the little scenes that make you fall in love over and over again. Below is one of my favorite poems about marriage. Here's to many more.

[Rob]
Some things I love about Flori in the form of my dedication to her in the preface of the dissertation I defended early 2007. Nerdy as it is, I can't think of a better way to say what these past years have meant to me:

I stand in awe of my exquisite companion, Flori, who, in addition to supporting me in my studies, has nurtured our wonderful daughters; relentlessly enlarged her own knowledge of the world and the human soul; and beautified women and the community around her. She need never fear that her work will go unsung or underutilized.

Wedding Poem
For Schele and Phil

by Bill Holm

A marriage is risky business these days
Says some old and prudent voice inside.
We don't need twenty children anymore
To keep the family line alive,
Or gather up the hay before the rain.
No law demands respectability.
Love can arrive without certificate or cash.
History and experience both make clear
That men and women do not hear
The music of the world in the same key,
Rather rolling dissonances doomed to clash.

So what is left to justify a marriage?
Maybe only the hunch that half the world
Will ever be present in any room
With just a single pair of eyes to see it.
Whatever is invisible to one
Is to the other an enormous golden lion
Calm and sleeping in the easy chair.
After many years, if things go right
Both lion and emptiness are always there;
The one never true without the other.

But the dark secret of the ones long married,
A pleasure never mentioned to the young,
Is the sweet heat made from two bodies in a bed
Curled together on a winter night,
The smell of the other always in the quilt,
The hand set quietly on the other's flank
That carries news from another world
Light-years away from the one inside
That you always thought you inhabited alone.
The heat in that hand could melt a stone.