Still chaos after all these years

I'm home alone on the morning of my 38th anniversary, but that's okay. The Bearded Wonder drove over to our house to do some chores and pick up the mail while I stayed in the house we're renting in Jackson to do the final preparations for the grandkids' visit next week, but we'll be back under the same roof by this evening, when we'll have plenty of time to celebrate our anniversary before starting up a whole new round of complicated events over the next week and a half.

This is the life we've built for ourselves: always going places, sometimes in the same vehicle and sometimes separately. We share time between two houses and follow two very different career paths that demand attention at odd and unpredictable times, and we devote ourselves to spending time with far-flung family, although that's been difficult during the pandemic. For the past couple of weeks we've shared the chaos of house-painting and next week we'll enjoy a more joyful type of chaos when we'll have the grandkids here without their parents for three days, but after 38 years, chaos is part of the DNA of our relationship. Maybe one day we'll have to slow down and resist the urge to engage in various forms of chaos, but for now, it's what we've got and we'll enjoy it.

But not at much as the starry-eyed couple in the photo is enjoying driving off to their honeymoon in a 1970 Dodge Dart, a car that stumbled and sputtered and looked like a dumpster on wheels but that took us to interesting places. That car is long gone but we're still going places 38 years later, and with luck we'll keep going a few years more, albeit a little more slowly.