27 Years....And Still

I celebrated my 27th wedding anniversary on October 15th 2017.

How do you even process loving the same someone for that many years and still hoping that you will get a million more?

Not sure but I still do.

This poem is just exactly:

You ask me today if I love you,

If I take you as my own to have and to hold,

and my heart relies Yes,

Always, evermore, even after,

Still.

Not just today before a crowd

but when we are alone,

you and I,

through years, through pain,

My heart will answer again and again,

still.

Ask me in a million seconds, ask me in

a billion years,

Do you still love me?

And I will say say still.

Ask me when we toil, when we rest,
when we fuss and fight.
With the taste of anger burning my lips,
I will say still.

Our love is a great river,

the Amazon, the Nile, the river

Euphrates,

and my hear is a violent churning in my chest

swimming upstream,

defying every odd, accepting any dare

To reach you.

To rush you,

to hold you,

to keep you.

You ask me if I love you?

God, yes.

My lover, you are the single star

in the universe void before you came.

And when the years have passed

and we have watched a thousand

sunsets,

and we are bent,

our bodies crooked with age

ask me again.

In the twilight

in the shadow of the life we have 

shared,

ask me is I love you.

and my heart will answer

before my lips can part,

My love, my life,

my heart never left your hands.

Always, evermore, even after,

Still.

I didn't write this... it was in a book I read but it is everything I feel sitting here thinking of my love.

We still love any excuse to go play and not that we even need one but 27 years got us eating donuts and heading into the city for brunch at Plow.  We usually go to Napa but with the unfortunate fires we headed west and were rewarded with our new favorite day.
They have the best breakfast in the city and my french toast will be a craving for the rest of my life.
With my new iphone 8 plus in hand I had fun taking tons of pictures.

Nicholas and Natali were flying in that night to go with us to Carmel the next day so we ate dinner in the Whole foods food court on the way to the airport.
It was fitting sitting there eating a salad talking about our life, our family and our love. It doesn't matter what we do as long as I am holding his hand. 
It's true. It fits perfectly.

 So after 27 years and some days later I still get excited to wake up beside you...

every single day.
I love you...
Thomas Call forever and
Still

The Road is Life...

The road with all it's bumps, corners, cracks, sharp turns, stops and smooth sailing I can see why people compare the open road to our this journey we all call life.

I love to drive

Ok we love to drive...as in me and my love.

I may have written this before but it will always warrant repeating because little things like that make up who we are. 

Driving 12 hours to Utah...nothin'

In fact driving 17 hours to our cabin in Montana every summer...nothin'

Tom and I jump in that car and just take off.  Most days it is just to get our comfort drink "diet coke"  because of his having to work and all. But the funny thing is even on our way home we will drive around our neighborhood for the millionth time to make our little drive longer.

So it is absolutely no shocker that last Monday, October 19, 2015, which is our 25th wedding anniversary, we drove (and ate) up and down highway 1, laughing our heads off.

Oh the irony of it all.

I had no idea that when I became Mrs. Thomas Groesbeck Call at 21 years of age, the journey we were about to embark on.

How could I?

I was, for all intents and purposes, a baby.

Me and my love have grown up together.  

We have journeyed down the road of life and brought 4 unbelievably, indescribable, amazing human beings into this world. We have experienced and grown through heartbreak, loss, pure joy, fear, stress, bliss and my favorite... unconditional love.

Huge pitfalls have unexpectedly been thrown our way along with stretches of just straight open road. 

But through it all we are side by side...hand in hand.

How was I so smart?

How did I marry someone that I would fall more and more in love with with each passing day?

It was 2 parts luck with 1 part of my soul telling me that I found him.

I found him and he found me.

This is something to really celebrate. 

25 years is a really long time.

So we spent the week end in Carmel as a family and then John and Ann took my kids home Sunday night and Tom and I stayed by ourselves at their house. 

We rented a little convertible and Thelma and Louise style just drove...well except they were running from the law but whatever.

The point is we drove and drove. 

We drove down the magical coastline of Big Sur with our hair blowing in the wind talking and laughing every minute.  (Much of the laughing may or may not have been caused by using a selfie stick for the first time:))))

We drove back to Carmel still laughing and rode bikes and had a picnic on the beach and got pastries at our favorite Carmel bakery and we drove some more.

We drove up highway 1 past our favorite coastal towns all the while with the ocean out the right side of the car and taking pictures of lighthouses and us because of that darn selfie stick. We drove along the coast at sunset up to San Francisco.

I know...I can't believe I get to be me and this is real life.

We ate at our favorite pizza place Gialina's and it should be noted that this is not your run of the mill or even slightly better pizza joint.  This is voted consistently the best pizza in San Francisco.

It is that good.

Followed by bi rite.

Somethings never change.

Some things really don't change.  

Most things do.

The person that I am on this journey with will never change.

He owns my heart.

Driving side by side all day on our 25th wedding anniversary is the best kind of irony.

I woke up the next day tucked in my loves arms praying that we will always have each other on this road we call life.

So we celebrated 25 years and 1 day.

All pictures taken with my iPhone because of that darn selfie stick....hahahaha

I Chose Wisely...

Me and my little sister loved Harrison Ford and I mean L.O.V.E and marry him and be happy forever kind of love.

My love started in Star Wars but it went to full conniption teen crazy love with Raiders of the Lost Ark.  

I was 12 years old when in 1981 the film came out.  

OK I think mostly I loved him but it was the two of us together, on our couch in the basement, wrapped in a blanket, that we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. And by our calculations it was around 100+ times. 

We had every single line memorized...every.single.one. 

100 could  be a low estimate but you see it was in the days when we thought we were so cool because we didn't have to wait for it to come on t.v.  It was about 1984 and my hip family owned the coveted VHS video player.

We were so in the future with that thing. Our machine was almost as big as some t.v.'s. It had those big huge primary colored buttons that were big enough that if you were almost blind you could see them.  Why do they make them so much more complicated now? I think they digressed because they were seriously on to something with that  simple VHS video first addition.  

Crap I always end up on some tangent that has nothing to do with the story at hand.

So back to the almost story which really isn't the real story either...ugh I just need to focus really hard.  It's hard always but especially right now because remember my boy gets back on Thursday and he has been gone for 2 years!!!

So any who we would go back and forth between "Raiders" and "The Man From Snowy River" depending on what mood we were in.  We loved Jim and Jessica. Australian accents and horsies too in "Snowy."

But nothing quite compared to my Indian Jones. 

I mean seriously...that hat.

We never watched the the sequels to Raiders as much as the original and that was probably because we just didn't own them. But this whole entire story is actually about the third "Raiders of the Lost Arc and the Last Crusade."

K remember when they are in that cave looking for the holy grail and the knight has the bad man choose between the hundreds and hundreds of cups?

He either chooses the holy grail and receives ever lasting life or any of the other cups and dies instantly.

He chooses the really fancy schmancy gold one and well, he dies.

The knight then looks at his bones and says, 

"You chose poorly."

Then Indy looks at the hundreds of cups and picks some unassuming crappy little goblet thing and the knight says.

"You chose wisely."

This is now the really real story.

I think about that all the time.

I met my Tom at 18.

Married him at 21.

That was 24 years ago October 19th.

What did I know about anything that has to do with anything at such a young age?

I was making the biggest decision of my life and I was not even a legal adult.

In short...

I just plain and simply chose wisely.

At the time I was madly in love and I knew I was marrying my best friend.

24 years later I am more madly in love and he is still my best friend.

Are there secrets to a happy marriage?

Probably.

I don't know have a clue what the secrets are though.

I just know that Tom treats me like gold and he acts and does something every day to make my dreams come true.

He makes me feel treasured, protected and loved and so I try really hard to make his dreams come true.

We don't agree on everything.

We have hard moments.

But at the end of the day... today is all we have.

Tomorrow is big, fat unknown.  

So even though I chose wisely all those years ago... I am still making choices every day and I am still choosing Tom and I always will.

After all he is so much better than Indiana Jones...even without that hat.

“The best time to love with your whole heart is always now, in this moment, because no breath beyond the current is promised.”-Fawn Weaver

We celebrated on a huge stunning beach on the Point Reyes seashore.

We hiked 1 1/2 in with our little blanket and picnic basket and I seriously thought that maybe we were on the Sahara desert.  

There was seriously that much sand and the beach was soooo big.

We were the only ones on it because you have to hike to get in.

So worth it.

It was the perfect weather and honestly it was a perfect day

We stopped in Point Reyes Station for our cheese supplies at 

"Cowgirl Creamery" and our artisan bread from "Brick Maiden" plus a few supplies from home.

I take a picture of this church every.single.time. I love it.  In my next life maybe I will get married in it. :)

We didn't know what to do for dinner so we talked about all of our possibilities because when you live in the bay area it is so endless it ridiculous.  But Tom said it best when he said, "how can we not celebrate and eat dinner in our favorite city in the world."

Yep that is all it took and we drove to San Francisco and ate at our favorite pizza place in all the land.

Ordered the Atomica and Heirloom tomato with bacon on half because not everyone eats meat. ;) and it was soooo good that it was ridiculous!

I would follow my man anywhere.

Here's to another infinity years.