44

Today my parents have been married for 44 years. I have been around for most of those years and I am here to tell you that they set the bar on marriage high, very high. It has been an absolute joy and blessing to grow up in a home where two people love and respect each other as these two do. I have never met two people more fitting to be together. She can ask where the "slanty edger" is, having never uttered that phrase in her entire life and he will immediately know that she is referring to the vacuum attachment that is slanted to vacuum along walls and know right where it is.  He can crack some eye rolling Jack Joke and she will giggle at it like it's the funniest thing she has ever heard (it probably is).  I remember being a little girl and never wanting to grow up and get married and leave them because the world they created around them for my sister and I was filled with so much love and understanding, I just could not imagine anything ever being as happy and wonderful but the nature of their love was to teach me how to recreate it in my adult life.  That has been the biggest blessing of being their child, the things they have taught me: the boundless love- how you can take a seed of that and spread it wherever you go, the respect you show to your children and how that makes them feel like they matter and how that is almost the absolute most important thing you will ever do for them, and the joy that comes from being able to be yourself with the people you love.

Here's to Nellie and Jake! 

44 and many more!!