Spring Feels Like Remembering

Maybe it’s the same kind of feeling that trees and flowers get, remembering how to shoot tiny leaves and buds out of themselves. Maybe it’s the bursting out into sunshine and cold spring air that makes them remember last spring and the spring before that and before that. Wherever that feeling comes from, I’m feeling it now. Spring makes me feel restless and reflective and a little bit like running away. I’m trying to figure out what it means…why spring makes me feel like this.

It’s like…that feeling you get when you see an old picture of yourself and you remember and it hurts. Even the happy pictures hurt. I watched our wedding video a couple nights ago. It was the first time I’d seen any of that footage. I kept pausing it to stare at that person in the video because I know it’s me, I see that it’s me…but I don’t recognize her. If I met her now, we’d be like strangers. I keep squinting at the screen, trying to x-ray her, remember what she was thinking and feeling and I can’t. If you asked me what my wedding day was like, I could tell you that I was so happy, that I couldn’t stop smiling, that it felt so quick and perfect but the girl in the wedding video…I feel like I don’t know her anymore.

Maybe it’s not like spring, at all. The way I remember and the way it was…they’re different. I wonder if a crocus wakes up in the spring and remembers all the other springs and thinks, this spring will be better than last spring…? Maybe crocuses just get to be brand new every spring and don’t have to feel the history of all the other springs that ever were weighing down on them like an impossibility.

But for me, spring is all about remembering. Every year, on that first warm-ish day when you don’t quite need a coat and birds sing Disney-style and suddenly everything smells like flowers…that’s the day I remember what it was like to plop fat garden snails into buckets, to dig in dark, earthy flowerbeds with Halmoni, to drive with the windows down and the radio up and think,  I want to drive with the windows down and the radio up every day forever, what it was like to be seventeen and falling in love, to be eighteen and planning a wedding, to be twenty-two and move far away from home, to be twenty-five and scared and tired and somehow okay.

I am one pathetic little crocus.
love, elizabeth

Our Love Story (Chapter 1)

 

Smithereens

Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

- Ani Difranco

There’s a tiredness that comes after a good cry. Maybe it’s the way the sinuses feel like pinched, old sea-beds or your cheeks crack with salt or that impossible way your limbs fold inwards as if to wrap themselves around you again and again. And it had been a good cry. The kind of cry that makes you think 17 is the most brutal year to have your heart broken. I’m sure the other years suck, too, but at any rate, it was a January night. A January night and freezing, when the 15-passenger van began to spin out of control and directly into oncoming traffic. They warn you about black ice but until you experience it on a dark Idaho highway in the middle of the night…well, it’s hard to explain the sleepy, slow motion feeling of sitting up and staring out at the semi-truck that’s about to hit you. A wide-eyed second where you think if the van doesn’t move in the next 2 seconds, you will be dead. But that cry made you so good and tired that for a moment you actually think, go ahead and smash me into smithereens. I can’t possibly feel worse. By the way, I turned out to be very, very wrong. And no, that semi-truck did not hit the van. Metaphorically, though…Well, let’s just say until you’re almost hit by a semi-truck, you’ll go on thinking that little Chevy pick-up is the real deal. You’d be wrong.

Two days after I survived near-oblivion by way of semi, I walked into the theatre building at my college. It was a first read-through for a play called Our Town. I am not even kind of exaggerating when I say that Thornton Wilder is responsible for all of this. It was at that read-through that I first saw Kyle.

Sometimes I imagine there were fireworks or explosions or dancing beams of light haloing around his head while The Bangles sang “Eternal Flame” and  a choir of heavenly angels announced, ELIZABETH, BEHOLD, YOUR SOULMATE DOTH ARRIVE AND LO, HE IS WEARING A GREEN BEANIE!

That did not happen.

In fact, it was days, weeks even, before I would really notice the shy skateboarder with the long green hair who hadn’t really wanted to be an actor but was there, all the same. It would take longer than that even to know what I know now. That I was a goner the second I walked into that first rehearsal. I didn’t need a semi-truck to smash me to smithereens. I was about to go humpty-dumpty all over the place. And if you think comparing falling in love to being hit by a truck is a little melodramatic…you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To Be Continued

Girl Confessions (and Parched Ovaries)

1. I was listening to this soundtrack in the car earlier. Singin’ in the Rain was probably the first musical I ever saw and this scene is one of my favorites. Especially when Debby Reynolds jumps out of the cake.




2. I feel like the dining room and office need some no-cost sprucing. When I figure out how to do THAT, I'll let you know! I feel like I need to throw away a lot and completely redo my filing system. Any by redo my filing system, I mean throw everything away and set the dumpster on fire. Yes?

3. Ever wonder what it would be like to be a Lego man in space? Wonder no more. This guy actually made it.


4. Remember when I asked if Downton Abbey was worth watching? Well…it is. It totally is.

Anna: Because I love you, Mr. Bates. I know it's not ladylike to say it but I'm not a lady and I don't pretend to be.

Bates: You are a lady to me.

I didn’t think I could crush so hard on a head housemaid and a valet but apparently, I can.

Source: google.com via Elizabeth on Pinterest

5. I got halfway through The Pioneer Woman's book, Black Heels to Tractor Wheels and was very taken with the story, interested in hearing how she and Marlboro Man fell in love. Then I read this and nearly chucked the book across the room:

[After a conversation that Ree and Marlboro Man have about how many babies they should make in the future] “My ovaries…were doing backflips, as if they’d been wandering, parched, in a barren wasteland and finally, miraculously, happened upon a roaring waterfall. And that waterfall was about six feet tall, with gray hair and bulging biceps. They never knew they could experience such hope” (Drummond 150).

I’m sorry, what? I don’t even…WHAT? Parched ovaries? I love you, Ree, but…really? Also, please stop describing every outfit you wore on every date with your husband ever. I can’t remember what I wore yesterday.

Alright, your turn. Girl confessions this week?

love, elizabeth

My Hipster Husband

I can’t decide who in this picture I want to kiss more.



Kyle: If you were ever hideously ugly and grotesque...I would want to be hideously ugly and grotesque so we could be ugly and grotesque together.

Elizabeth: That's so romantic.





I’ve finally decided to actually blog about how Kyle and I met and fell in love and all of it. It’s a complicated one, I guess, and not very many people have heard the whole story. I wrote the first chapter and I’ll be posting it this coming week. I hope you’ll come back and read.

love, elizabeth

Girl Confessions

More girl thoughts today…

1. I’ve pretty much cut foundation out of my make-up routine entirely. Instead, I’ve been using a lot of this. My skin is so happy.

2. Ryan Gosling just saved a woman from being hit by a car, further proving himself worthy to be my movie husband. I have talked about before.

3. I can’t stop messing with my blog header. It’s like a pimple.

4. I watched this episode of New Girl last week and I cannot remember the last time I laughed that hard. Seriously perfect dialogue. If you aren’t hooked on this show yet, Dermot Mulroney’s guest appearance will sell you. I embedded my favorite clip for you.

5. This video makes me want to time-travel. Although I’d probably be just as uncoordinated in the 1920’s.

6. When I went into Starbucks this morning and saw my husband behind the counter, I got all tongue-tied and shy ordering my caramel latte. And then he wrote this on my cup. Love of my life.

What about you? Got any girl confessions today?

love, elizabeth

Song for a Sunday

Source: smadirty.tumblr.com via Kyle on Pinterest

Totally fell in love with Kyle all over again this slow Sunday morning and this song popped into my head (thank you, Sarah, as always for introducing me to the best music). I have just been in awe of him all weekend. Even folding the laundry feels romantic today. So I apologize for the mushiness but it’s a mushy weekend, I guess.

What about YOU? What’s your Sunday song?

love, elizabeth

PS: Only 12 more hours to enter the Don’t Worry, Be Happy Giveaway! Want to win your own copy of The Happiness Project? Don’t miss this chance!

What It Was Like To Be 17 And In Love

Let’s just say that spring makes me nostalgic. And spring nights make me nostalgic for the period in my life in which I was doing the most wonderful, frightening thing I have ever done…falling in love. There’s just something about the way the leaves sound at night, the way the grass feels on your feet, the way everything is so still and dark, the way the ground smells sweet and kind of sad after it rains. If I close my eyes for a second, I am seventeen all over again and I am full of blushing-crimson-heart pounding-achy-secret smiles and I don’t know where to even BEGIN to store all the happiness in my heart. I just remember sitting on the front steps at nine o’clock at night and thinking, No one has ever felt as terrible and wonderful as I feel right now.

Tonight feels like that.

 

 

What about you? What reminds you of falling in love?

Love is in the learning...or study habits for lovers

I cannot honestly tell you when I fell in love with Kyle. Was it the day he complimented my gigantic walkman, circa 1989, in a dark empty theatre? The basement cast-party where he made me laugh so hard, I spit water out all over his face? Or the night I drove him home and he turned to me as he jumped out of my 1999 Astro mini-van and mumbled, "I love you," rain soaking through his grey hoodie and long hair? Was it that first rehearsal after his brother had died, unexpectedly, at the age of 29, when he stood on the stage across from me, looking lost? Or the July afternoon in the parking lot of the carwash, his face dark with sun, wearing that horrible dog-farting t-shirt I begged him to throw away? Or the night of our sophomore year of college when I smashed my finger in the door frame and began to cry and then noticed the tears running down Kyle's face...when I had asked him what was wrong, he replied, "You're hurt"...? Or the day he left for California when he freaked out about gum on the bottom of the flip-flops I had bought for him? Maybe it was the late night sitting on his kitchen floor where he flippantly proposed marriage (oh, if he only he had KNOWN what he was in for!)?

Honestly, I don't know when it happened. One second, I was just me and the next...I was me and Kyle, wrapped up in one impossibly big blanket of understanding that this, THIS was it. But even then...I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know how many nights I would spend sleepless, afraid and trembling, days I would spend fighting, falling, and getting up again, afternoons I would spend helplessly in love, beyond comprehension or thought or words.

I had a minor epiphany the other day, though...Because the Kyle I fell in love with is a new Kyle every day. Certainly, the Elizabeth he fell in love with is a new Elizabeth every half-hour! And I realized that I am falling in love with a brand new Kyle all the time.

Perhaps, most importantly, my idea of how to love is changing, growing. Expanding. I feel like I'm enrolled in a constant crash-course guide to my husband.

Falling in love might only take a moment. But loving someone is like...learning a foreign language. Somedays, I think my love gets lost in translation. I'm sure he feels that way with me, too. But now and then, like with my very limited French, I learn a new verb tense or a fantastic new adjective that gives me a chance to more adequately say: "I love you, Kyle, to the moon and back, and while my study habits need improving, I hope you'll give me an A...because I'm learning."