Tuesday, March 13, 2007

The cotton anniversary

Yesterday was our second wedding anniversary. It was a good day.
Being married now is a lot more fun than it was two years ago -- it's absolutely true what they say about the first year of marriage. It's no pony ride. When I look back, I can see just how mulishly I resisted the trappings of coupledom: I was anti shared bank accounts, or credit cards, or decisions about all kinds of things from what to buy at the grocery store ("but I like this type of peanut butter!") to what color we should stain the deck. And we had already lived together for a year and a half.
Coming to America has forced us to meet in the middle on so many issues. We furnished the apartment from scratch -- no 10-year-old offerings from university flatting days, kitschy collectibles, or inherited dining tables to try to mesh into a coherent style. We picked everything together and were chuffed when one or the other of us scored something for free, a word that has become a totem these past, impoverished months.
A trip to the basement to recycle our glass and plastic netted what I like to think of as a "shabby chic" occasional table.
Me: "Look, hon, behind the boxes. Do you think that belongs to anybody? It's kinda dirty but let's take it!"
Tim: "That's my girl!"
And I couldn't have been prouder when I came home from work one night to find Tim sitting in an armchair he found on the footpath across the street.
Tim: "Do you like it?"
Me: "Yeah! Where was it?"
Tim: "Over by the consignment store. I looked out the window and saw it had a yellow sign taped to the front, but I couldn't read it. So I ran down and..." He smiled and pulled the sign from behind his back. In red letters, underlined twice, it read: "Free!!"
Other great scores: a picture of a pretty Renaissance girl (from the basement), a black bedside table for Tim (basement), a $5 bedside table for me (flea market), awkward cutlery that is weighted such that it rolls crazily in the hand (my brother's kitchen).
We now have shared bank accounts, and a credit card, and matching checkbooks, and for the past four months we've also had matching jobs.
Then yesterday I was hired for a month's mag work, so we took a picnic down to Crissy Field and celebrated our liberation from the bookstore and our anniversary with potato bread and spicy hummus and some cut-price Valentines chocolates from the pharmacy. It was a gorgeous day, the first really warm t-shirt day since October. We lay in the sun and read our books and watched tankers passing under the Golden Gate and felt peaceful.
Then we went home and tried to fix our cranky old toilet, which had blocked for the fourth time in two months. Ah, the romance.