Today is my wedding anniversary. I have been married to my best friend, Bill, since May 10, 2008. It was the second anniversary of our first date. We are sentimental like that.

On our first date, Bill and I had lunch and then walked to a nearby park.  It began to sprinkle rain, so we ducked into a shelter house filled with picnic tables.  We sat and talked about everything imaginable for a couple of hours.  We watched a mother robin feeding her babies in a nest under the eaves.  All too soon, it was time for me to pick up my daughter from school, and the magical first date came to an end.   As time passed, we often reminisced about the rain, the robins, and the hope that was born that day.

When we got married, Bill had two adult daughters. My daughters were aged twenty-three and thirteen. We said, only half-joking, that our marriage was the triumph of hope over experience.  We had both had long-term marriages before, and we had both mourned the failure of those marriages.  As we anticipated our wedding day, we were determined to look forward, not back.

We still owned our wedding bands from our first marriages.  They lay tucked away in boxes, awkward reminders of the past.  It didn’t feel exactly right to sell them.  It was as though we thought bad karma might be clinging to them.  We briefly entertained the thought of giving them to one or the other of the children, but which ones?  And we didn’t want to risk that bad karma thing.

We decided to create our own personal sacrament, one that was deeply meaningful to me.

A few days before our wedding, we returned to the site of our first date.  I carried a small drawstring bag with our old rings nestled inside.  Bill carried a trowel.  We knelt under a tree near the shelter house.  Bill sliced an opening in the earth, and I dropped the bag containing the rings into it.  Bill gently replaced the sod, and we embraced.  We symbolically buried our past at the place where our future began.

Happy fifth anniversary, Sweet William.  Our marriage has been a triumph of hope.  I love you very much.