Another year has come and gone, another anniversary, as I miss my Carrie Jane. I had to be away yet again due to military life, but we spoke over the phone, and you are singing at church and are in your element, and I am in mine.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

When I look back over decades of life together now, and understand providence not just as a theological doctrine but as light unto my path, I am grateful–for your patience with me, for your forgiveness, for your putting up with my weird ways, for your dedication, loyalty, and commitment to home and our children, and for the ways we laugh at things only we understand.

I knew when I saw you all those years ago–with your jeans on and your black sandals, and your pretty toes, and your long piano fingers, I knew then you’d be my Carrie Jane. And all these years later, you still are. Happy anniversary.