not so metallic rewards

(instead of coming up with a new entry - here's an email i just spent my daily writing quota on... finally replied to an old friend that i haven't spoken to in quite a while --- cut, paste, done)

- so sorry i' m so delinquent in returning your hello.
because i think you are fabulous - and hope you are very very well!!

it's my work email and it's been a bit fast forward here lately so for all my good intentions i never complete a response. (doh)
everything wedding - so i'm about to bore you - it's my current world and it's a strange one but hey you understand - after all you were there not so long ago....

life just became flavored with that slight metallic taste of stress.
it was so mellow for the longest time.
we found all the right people, put down deposits and beamed proudly at all the work we had done so early. so proud, so boast-y, such novices...

but now it's four months away and here we be. we've made spreadsheets and plotted charts and calendars. we have a map with miniatures too but we keep loosing people to the vacuum cleaner. it's not so bad as before we realized on paper the to do list could actually be done...

but then there is also the money.
so damn expensive...
gaining a whole new respect for the eloping elite.

we're going to italy for our honeymoon. and VERY excited about it. talking about it is now the respit from the other have-to's. maybe because it's just ours? maybe because it's ITALY!

and then there are the matters of health and circumstance. our parents are older and ailing and there are these phone calls of hospitals and dads and brains and hearts and spines and i think we were both over the fact that our parents aren't superhuman (that pedestal got kicked out so long ago) but the facts of frailty. and mortality. and our helplessness. of course it's nothing everyone else doesn't know all too well. were not special in this stress and sadness. but it is ours and it is prevalent and we want so much to be able to do something more than all this feeble nothing.

and then there is that metallic taste of stress. sometimes we even accidentally spit copper at each other. every once in a while - over the absolute silliest things (a dirty cutting board, some words said with the wrong inflection) but we've been learning the art of communication and argument (all part of the cohabitation lessons of love).

and we are so very in love - that still and evermore is the thing that is most amazing to me. that i have him. and he is perfect even in all of his imperfection and my life is now of us and not of me and i have never been so calm and quietly sure about what should be such a massive life altering thing.

aren't we supposed to be nervous? people pat him on the back and he blinks as they say hah: your freedom will be gone, and people say to me, hah, you'll have to train him to be a husband. and we look at them sorta sad because don't they know how wonderful it can be? maybe there is the chance that we are ignorant and becoming bitter and hateful is inevitable but i dont think so. i really dont think so. he says i am his freedom and i say he already is the perfect husband and we shrug and know that life is always going to have it's challenges - but it's already a good dream. and we're a family.

and then there is this wedding planning. registering (our most recent edeavor) is a very odd custom. i'm going to click on this wicker plate holder thingy and then some family member who i met once when i was really really short is going to buy it for me with a response that she cannot fly out to seattle but hopes i love the wicker plate holder thingy and best wishes for our new life together... and i will thank her, trying very hard to remember what she looks like while accidentally conjuring a mental picture of dame edna. and in the future when i am eating off of my warm earthenware plate sitting prettily on the wicker plate holder thingy, will i think of her?

then there's the wedding itself (which i need your address for) - as you and hopefully everyone will eventually be invited - even though there are these A B and C lists? of how one sends invitations - but we aren't really managing this...

so this is me and here i am making life altering decisions like: envelope lining colors, and pedestal types. and pithicus is thankfully very involved and coming along as we taste and touch and choose all the elements of a day that is our public display of connection and then... oh yes, then we are rewarded for so much time lost to tedium.

and what an awesome reward: walking the connecting cliffs from town to italian riviera town of Chinqua Terra, having a suit made for my 6'9" darling in Milan, being pushed through the stinky but romantic canals of venice, and sipping on some secret family recipe lemoncello while sitting on the family farm of the agritourismo owners while they point past the fields of sunflowers to another tuscan hillside town and regale us with stories of when this was the land fought over by warring families.... quiet unpublished stories of their own italian montigue's and capulet's and then i will taste metallic flavors NO MORE and only the sweet sweet wonders another world has made of the lemons life gave them.

Heh - ever start writing to a friend only to realize you are in that writing mood? anyway - i hope you are so very good and happy and healthy and please now will you rant back about you? you you you.

with dreams of pesto and chianti,
d