38

Today Mario and I celebrate 38 years of marriage. I've accepted a pretty challenging poetry challenge: write a love poem in the pattern of a love poem classic. I choose Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I love Thee?" An ambitious comparison, but hopefully you'll see parallels. 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

I love the way you smell like lemongrass and taste like peppermints. Or when you're smoking cigars outside in the wind,  the freshness of it makes your face glow. When you come inside, you carry the aroma of a library book, one that keeps getting borrowed, its pages bursting with promise, because it's that good. Sometimes, our shared life has the scent of good cigars or favorite library books, right before the canoe tips over and spills everything into the raging river we're on. Sometimes our shared life is like the morning, when we first wake, then  reach up to the ceiling with a tall stretch, and there's sunlight streaming through the window and daffodils blooming in the garden, and you don't yet notice the mushrooms eating the wooden fence or the rats nesting behind the garden shed. Sometimes our shared life seems so warm  and hopeful until I remember how this world is sometimes cold and unforgiving. When I take  a step back, I  bump into you because you're usually near. I love you because you still enjoy the cigars and the sunshine and when I get up in the morning you say hello beautiful, want some coffee? Instead of saying can you believe those damn mushrooms eating our fence and those damn rats? Instead of leaving, and escaping the mundane, annoying distractions you love me enough to stay and build a life that sparkles. If I count the ways I love you, there would be too many flavors and aromas and too many reasons to love you.