Twenty-one years ago today, Tom and I got married. For days beforehand, the temperature had been brutally hot, and our wedding day was the culminating worst in a series of bad. Even at ten o'clock in the morning, the shady, dank, little Friends' Meetinghouse was almost unbearable, and the reception in my parents' yard was absurd. My wedding cake, which I'd baked myself, was sliding apart at the layers; my father, in a fit of hysteria, starting dropping ice down the front of my best friend's dress. It was the sort of day when everyone, old and young, longs to strip off his clothes and toss them into the garbage. Nonetheless, we all managed to stay clad, though the sweat stain on the back of the best man's jacket did make him look as if he were wearing the Shroud of Turin.


Tom and I spent our wedding night in our un-air-conditioned apartment, balancing at opposite sides of the bed, doing everything possible to avoid having our skin touch.

Twenty-one years later, I'm glad to report that the weather has improved.

   

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?

So far from variation or quick change?

Why with time do I not glance aside

To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

Why write I still all one, ever the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell my name,

Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,

And you and love are still my argument;

So all my best is dressing old words new,

Spending again what is already spent:

            For as the sun is daily new and old,

            So is my love still telling what is told.

--William Shakespeare, sonnet 76