You Know You've Been Married A Long Time When . . .

You know you've been married a long time when you go to a lace group meeting on your wedding anniversary.

(But coincidentally, the motif I drew in our exchange, hidden in a plain white envelope, was the bobbin lace heart made by my friend Tatt3r.)

Let's see, as of yesterday we've been married for 19 years. But we hung out together for eight or nine years before we got married. I don't have enough toes to count how many years that is altogether.

The summer of our wedding was very hot and very dry. When we left for our honeymoon, instead of green grass along the sides of the highway, there were strips of sunburned brown. Many record high temperatures were recorded that summer, in the high 90's and low 100's F.

Neither of us really loves very hot weather, and by the end of the summer, we said if we hadn't killed each other in the heat, we were probably in it for the long haul.

What I remember about my wedding day:

I forgot my veil at home and had to send one of my brothers back to get it.

As I walked down the aisle on my dad's arm, I realized the face veil was thrown back over my head, and made the lightning decision that pulling my arm out of Dad's and pawing the veil back down would look much weirder than just leaving it back there.

When the minister started the vows, there was a long, a very long, pause while my nervous soon-to-be-husband didn't realized he was supposed to start repeating them.

I felt so nervous and shy walking back up the aisle afterwards that I looked down at the carpet, so my wedding pictures have great photos of my eyelids.

Our caterer packed up the leftover food and took it home a couple of hours into the reception.

We had some of our photos taken near the creek behind the church, where I discovered that wedding-veil tulle netting is great for catching bugs.

In the late evening after the reception, we went up in a hot-air balloon dressed in our wedding finery. I still think the balloon launch was a great metaphor for the start of a marriage.

I thought I would be scared going up in the balloon, but after the adrenaline rush of walking down the aisle, the balloon launch did not feel as scary.

I showed up at the church before the ceremony in a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans.

And we'd marry each other again in a second!