Like Coming Home

"...it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together... and I knew it. I knew it the very first time I touched her. It was like coming home... only to no home I'd ever known... I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like... magic."

I still remember the first time I held hands with Brian Haws.  We had just parked the car at the Salt Lake City Airport, were crossing the street to go pick up his parents, when he reached out for my hand.  It wasn't planned.  It wasn't premeditated.  It just happened as naturally as anything in the world.  It felt right.  It felt warm.  It felt like...magic.  It felt like coming home.

Today we celebrate 28 years of coming home, of being in a marriage that stands the test of time and space, and every kind of test that life can throw at two people.

I hesitate to share openly here about the depth and breadth and height of my love for Brian Haws.  It is too dear to my heart; too sacred.  And yet I can share great quotes from others about the true nature of love.  That is far enough removed to honor it, without my becoming a blubbering mess.   Maybe.  I see and hear things all the time that remind me of my husband.  So many songs, the ones with happy endings:

"I'm gonna love you forever

Forever and ever amen,

As long as old men sit and talk about the weather

As long as old women sit and talk about old men.

If you wonder how long I'll be faithful

I'll be happy to tell you again

I'm gonna love you forever and ever

Forever and ever amen."

Is it any surprise, that my friend, Emerson, also has much to say on the subject of eternal love and the metamorphosis of the marriage relationship?

"Their once flaming regard is sobered by time...At last they discover that all which at first drew them together...had  a prospective end...and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage....That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever."

He is right.  Time passes, and we change.  Love changes.  It may no longer be the breathless and heady elixir common to youth.  It becomes fuller, and richer, and more stable.  And certainly more gratifying.

Happy Anniversary to the love of my life.  To me, there is nothing in the world as lovely as coming home.

(Thanks to Sleepless in Seattle, Randy Travis, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, for their timeless quotes on love.)