So, Once.

So, once there was a boy.

He was tall (REALLY tall) and he had brown eyes that crinkled at the corners when he looked at me. He was funny. He thought I was funny. He smelled, really good, so good that I kept finding myself drawing closer and closer to him. He said things I didn't expect, and liked things like I do, and just, sort of, got me. Meeting K. was like meeting someone who spoke my language for the very first time.

Oh, and life goals? Kids, yes. Farm, yes. Happiness. Double-check. And life-long matrimony. Yep, matrimony as a goal.

So, all of twenty-two, I married him. I married him like falling off a cliff, the way young people do, but I was smart enough to make sure there was a net at the bottom. And so, two kids and businesses and life changes later (we've surprised ourselves and each other quite a bit with what we've done and are doing :) ), we are still rock-solid. I love being married. I don't say it aloud much, because it seems like tempting fate, but it's two days past our eleventh anniversary, and maybe once a decade or so, I should get to brag. I love, love, love being married to K. It's my favorite thing in the world.

He doesn't make me happy all the time. I'm not happy all the time. I don't float around our admittedly idyllic life in a state of bliss... I'm myself, and so that means I'm sometimes grumpy, often tired, and always easily irritated by sundry small quirks of living with K (pants? Pants? How many places can one man PUT pairs of pants that they don't belong? And why are his enormous clodhopper shoes everywhere I ever go?). But here's the magical part: I get to be myself, and I STILL get to be happily married to this man. He's okay with me being batshit crazy a quarter of the time and super happy about an eight of the time and really kind of over domestic mayhem 90 percent of the time and who knows what I'm like the rest? He doesn't care. He's happy to be married to me, whatever I'm like, about 99 percent of the time. And me? Well, I take him for granted and I count on him.

But then, periodically I look up at this still super-tall, still eye-crinkling man whom I spend my life with and he still, to this day, takes my breath away.