A Sunny Anniversary Garden Party And A Not So Stormy Marriage

Jeff Modereger and I tying the knot a 
decade ago, August 26, 2012. It's been
sunshine and blue skies since. 

 This post is only tangentially related to the weather, but that's OK, we'll manage for one day, right?

Here in St. Albans, Vermont, we're having a garden party to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Hard to believe Jeff and I have been married ten years, but there you go. 

Our wedding anniversary was actually this past Friday, but we decided the celebration would be today. The weather gods blessed us with a cool morning to get ready for the shindig, and the day promises to be very sunny and comfortably warm. 

On the day we married, August 26, 2012, the weather was very much like what is forecast today. It was sunny and in the 80s. 

I guess our entire marriage has been like that, from my perspective. Sunny and warm. Oh, sure, we've had our chilly. even frosty moments, like everybody does, but those quickly pass. The gusty storms of arguments pass by even faster. These storms were never severe, and didn't seem to leave behind any damage. 

It's one of the reasons I married Jeff in the first place. He has a sunny, optimistic disposition as opposed to the occasion dense fogs of pessimism I try to fight back. 

The winds of time blow strong, and things are of course different now than they were. Our young puppy Jackson of 2012 is now an old dog, not learning many new tricks. Jeff and I have aged, and I've started referring to ourselves as Statler and Waldorf.

Our surroundings are different. Jeff redesigned our decrepit house into a showcase. I took an overgrown sad property and turned it into gardens. 

I think of our marriage as a kind of force field. Knock on wood, we hope it continues. We've been lucky. Disasters have mostly not befallen us. We're like that house on the end of the street that looks fine after the tornado while all the other homes in the neighborhood are leveled.

I'm a challenging person to live with. Some scars from my sometimes problematic childhood sometimes get in the way. And my ADHD is frustrating to me, and more so to the people around me. How Jeff puts up with this, I'll never know. 

He's a strong guy, and I get nourishment from that. He's the long rainy spell to my droughts of doubt. The warm south wind that melts away my icicles of frustration. The sunshine that cuts through the low clouds and drizzle, dispersing all that to create a blue sky life for me. 

We look forward to the future, even though we don't know what that will bring. Long range weather forecasts are seldom reliable, and guessing what things will be like in five to ten years is just as iffy. 

They say that climate is your personality and a day's weather is your mood. The Climate of Jeff is steady,  stable, comfortable, not prone to extremes and makes life feel safe. The opposite of the climate crisis afflicting the real world, I guess. 

So I have that. It's a lot. I got extremely lucky when I met Jeff. He'd better know that. I was actually reluctant to marry him at first. Not because I had any misgivings about Jeff. I didn't. I had misgivings about me. 

It always seems to rain on my parties. So I figured a marriage would just end in a stormy disaster, just like so much of life does.

I thankfully found the courage to run my life without worrying about the "weather" so much. Jeff gently encouraged that. I made by far my life's best decision when I popped the question. That yes I got meant the world to me, and still does. Even more so than it did a decade ago. 

It turned out the marriage did not lead to more storms, more gloom in life. Over the past decade, Jeff has slowly made progress in making me understand that life is partly sunny, not partly cloudy. 

When I was little, I was terrified of thunderstorms. Now, I love them. They're my favorite kind of weather.   Jeff is teaching me to understand that all of life's "thunderstorms" are not something to hide from or fear. but you learn from them. Problems might be a pain, but they're interesting.  I'll never love life's challenges, and I'll always whine about them but Jeff is making me realize when you face storms together, you win.  

 Thanks to Jeff, it's been wall to wall sunshine through a decade of marriage.  Just like the weather will be today during our celebratory outdoor garden party. 

I think today's weather forecast is a good omen for Jeff and me. I love you so much, Chief!