thirteen

I know many people who like to drop birthday celebrations when they get older. Don't remind me! -- is one common theme. I'm puzzled by this: you don't want to acknowledge how lucky you are to have lived this long? Weird. Then there are those who are so even tempered, that they can't understand the need for a high that accompanies a celebration (but then they also do not get the low of a cloudy, drizzly, achy day). Ed is like that. One day is as lovely as the one before, as full of the quiet as the one that follows, as extraordinary in its ordinariness as all the rest.

So you wont catch him celebrating his birthday (which is today). When I mock him for this, he'll retort -- it's an artifact!
I answer -- so is most everything that we do every day. We play by made-up rules. None of them have significance unless we impart significance to them.

He can't win on this day because for me, October 20th is loaded: not only is it his birthday (meaningless!), but, too, it marks the anniversary of our time together. Thirteen years. Only travel has given us time off from one another.  In all other days, since that joining of our lives thirteen years ago, there has always been a breakfast, like this one...






... and a dinner (see below). Together.


I had set aside time to do stuff with the old guy (hey, 68 is no peanuts!), but the weather -- well, the morning cold sent the cheepers scurrying...






And much to everyone's surprise, unexpected clouds dumped something that quite resembled snow (to the complete delight of Snowdrop, I hear).

A week of luminescence, a weekend of wind and the first delicate layer of the white stuff!






What? Have you forgotten what snow looks like? It's very pretty. The barest and darkest of branches profit from a cover of delicate flakes.






But is it hiking weather? Our October 20th nearly always includes a hike.

Let's wait a while.

I write, he chops trees. We are so perfect at this kind of rhythm.

The skies clear. The wind picks up, but even in this cold, cold set up, the snow melts. You want to go to Lake Farms Park up the road?

Up the road means we pass the hang out of the sandhills. And isn't that a beautiful sight?!





Our walk is brisk. The wind is strong and I'm not surprised to see most of the autumnal colors blown off the shivering trees. The remaining leaves have not yet turned crisp. Their green looks strangely out of place next to bare branches.






It is a good walk. All our hikes -- short and long, easy and not so easy are good walks.

In the evening, we return to our dinner place -- Brasserie V, where we sit at the bar and order moules frites and take that selfie that we've taken over the years...





Happy birthday, happy anniversary, or, if Ed could just have it his way -- plain old happy. Nothing more, nothing less.