Thank You, Eva

I just can't believe
the way I feel about you girl
We'll look back someday
At this moment that we're in
And I'll look at you and say
'--and I thought I loved you then'...
--Brad Paisley, "Then"

Thanksgiving happens to fall on our thirteenth wedding anniversary this year. This could not be more apt.
I'm thankful for everyone and everything in my life. But most of all I'm thankful for Eva, the woman I married. Some days I wonder how I ever found a woman willing to share life with me, and every day I wonder what I ever did to deserve this woman, whose intelligence, competence, and compassion truly know no bounds.
We've done a lot of living in thirteen years. There have been no ups and downs in our relationship--it is the ever-fixed mark--but in that many years there are bound to be tears. And fears, and fears, and leers, and -- in our case -- whole careers. No jeers, though, and nary a peer has my Eva. We have truly lived Spider Robinson's maxim: "Shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased." 

It isn't the life we expected. There were supposed to be kids, kids who would be either approaching or well into the tempestuous teens by now. If you had told Eva ten years ago that she'd be working where she is now,  I doubt she'd have believed you. For that matter, I swore up and down I'd never work more than the occasional night shift again, and here I am working straight nights and (for the most part) loving the hell out of it.
But like Douglas Adams said, "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be". Life is a very neat combination of purposeful (busy purposeful, this year) and damned idyllic. Thirteen years on, I can't imagine what my life would be like without Eva in it...and don't want to.

Thank you, love, for all that you are. Happy lucky 13th.

Your loving husband

Ken