Last week, Eric and I celebrated our ten year wedding anniversary. We've managed to be together for each of them --- not an easy feat with my travel schedule --- and we have also managed to be together for every Thanksgiving, which occurs a week to a day after our anniversary. Our first Thanksgiving as a married couple was celebrated with our best man's family in Seattle --- Sean and Cambria got married the week after we did, so their wedding was the first stop on our honeymoon trip!
This year, we gave Thanks in my nice rented apartment in the West Loop of Chicago. We have a great cityscape view, and are just a couple of blocks from the opera house, which makes it very convenient. Eric walks me to rehearsal every day, and meets me when I'm done to walk back. The apartment is completely furnished, and everything is taken care of --- weekly maid service, all utilities included, even a tiny washer-dryer in the closet. There's not much clutter, the detritus of our lives that we tend to accumulate, the gigantic nests we create of items both meaningful and trivial and downright ridiculous. Even our duties are streamlined. All I have to do, for the most part, is go to work, do some grocery shopping once in a while, take care of a few things going on at home. Eric can sit at the dining table and look out over the city, working while I'm at rehearsal.
So in a way, it's a very idyllic existance. It reminds me of life when we were first married and living in an apartment (not as nice as this one!), before we got a house and dogs and a lot more stuff and many more responsibilities. And we don't even have kids! Back then, it was just the two of us together; and of course we were both working, but we also had time to play and to just spend time being with each other.
Being here is idyllic, and unrealistic in that it's a temporary oasis, a sort of vacation from our real life. It's peaceful, and I want to take some of this peace home with us. I want to get rid of some of the detritus, both the physical and mental clutter. We both work pretty much all the time, and we never take vacations. We each have too many projects. There was a time when we'd walk the trails near our home twice a day; we might do it once a week now.
As I think about the past ten years of my life, and what I want the next ten years to look like, I want us to be able to enjoy our time together more. I want us to have more idyll, wherever we happen to find ourselves. But we certainly should be able to have it in our own home.
