What Did and Didn’t Last

It’s been twenty years since you undid the bobby pins from my updo, twenty years since we said a couple I Do’s to promises we couldn’t really keep yet—for worse, for poorer, in sickness, til death—all in faith that everything we had right then would last. But packaged back in our rental house on Leland Avenue were boxes and boxes of products that wouldn’t make it to see this anniversary.

What is still here—the good soup ladle, pasta spoon, and metal spatula (but not the junk we got at the Dollar Store, of course), half the silverware, most of the steak knives, the electric griddle (so many pancake Saturdays, so many bananas, so many chocolate chips, gallons of maple syrup) but not the Foreman grill, the KitchenAid mixer but not the pancake batter bowl (lost somewhere during our COVID year), the pasta strainer but none of the wheat pasta (the dairy is gone, too, except when I make whipped cream,  or order pizza, or make nachos, or insist on a trip to get ice cream).

Our entire first (and second, and third) set of plates, bowls, and mugs are long gone, dropped and chipped and cracked from Akron to Ashland and back again, twice. We’ve lost two of the fancy crystal wine goblets and one of the little crystal liqueur glasses, but all of the multi-colored champagne flutes remain (our three kids like to sip their bubbly grape juice from them and then leave them out for someone else to wash, like they’re at a fancy party, don’t worry, the help will take care of them).

Between Leland and Berry Avenues, we’ve left behind four houses, three dogs, several fish, and a bearded dragon named Joey, lost four babies and several visions of what our future would look like, and I think we finally got rid of all of those identical t-shirts you had in a box when we first moved in? The slow fashion, spaghetti jars as cups, Recyclops, compost queen in me now wonders what I was thinking?! We could have saved so much money and landfill square footage if I had just let you keep wearing that exact same shirt for the last 240 months!

We walked around Target in the in-between engagement and wedding day armed with a laser scanner and ideas about what it would take to make our new home. You scanned the most ridiculous things, just to see what people might buy us. I picked what seemed affordable, practical, and reasonable. You chose a flat-screen TV, which was absurd because no one had those back then and no one is going to buy that for us, I can’t believe you’re registering for that, would you stop it! I had to keep taking the radar gun from your grip and deleting the ridiculous from our list.

My one aunt ignored my Teflon pots and pans and went off-script, buying us the nicest set of KitchenAid pots and pans we didn’t register for, which was just like her. They’re still here, along with the ridiculousness that ignites each day with you, laughter punctuating our daily dance in a kitchen I never dreamed of in a life beyond our imagination with three children more far apart from each other than the points of the largest triangle and yet somehow just like us in a million different ways all filled with your ridiculousness and maybe some of my stubborn practicality and our grins as we torment them with unabashed affection as our two 12-pound white devil angels demand to be walked and fed and loved in this town we didn’t imagine moving to or returning to or staying in with all these people whose lives have become inextricably entwined with ours. We even still have some fish that won’t die.

I would take it all again, the thumbs that didn’t last, the jobs that didn’t last, the health that didn’t last, the valley and mountaintop seasons that didn’t last, the million major and minor deaths we’ve borne witness to these last twenty years. I would take it all again for the life that keeps being resurrected here, each day, the life that keeps evolving into new guitars and dishwashers, fresh pillows and better sheets, plates that don’t break, the lesson they are teaching me that if you invest in something good, it just might last.