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Last week Rodney and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. I’d like to say that we planned an extravagant evening out on the town, retreated to a luxury hotel room, and enjoyed some breakfast mimosas in front of a roaring fire. 

Instead, it went down like this:

Phone conversation, transcript, November 13, 2014, 8AM: 

MUM: “Happy Anniversary Jess!”

ME: “What?!”

MUM: It’s your 10th anniversary today, remember?

ME: [silence]

We are not good at remembering dates.

Each year my Mum reminds us of our anniversary by sending flowers. This year, I could tell that she was somewhat shocked that we hadn’t even remembered our 10th. She tried to brush it off “Well, there have really been so many anniversaries, it is hard to keep track…” but in her voice there was a trace of “get it together people.”

It’s not that we don’t care for each other – in fact it’s the opposite. Every day feels like a celebration. We eat most dinners at home together, often after the kids have gone down, accompanied by a glass of wine. We make each other laugh; bleary-eyed tear-filled laughs. Yes, we irritate each other in the way that couples do. I am mostly to blame. But there is love, lots of it, and we remind ourselves of that frequently.

But 10 years….it’s something that should be commemorated, if not with a bronze plaque, then at least with some tequila.

By some twist of fate, there were exactly two tequila shots left in our bottle of Jimador that we smuggled back from our wedding in Mexico. Not easy for a Tuesday night, but sometimes you just have to do what it takes.

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We’ll plan a big dinner out soon – once we get through the holidays, the merriment, the wrapping, the unwrapping, and the sheer happy fatigue of it all.

For now, we kept things simple, because a weekend at home beats any evening out….

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We’ve had several sets of plans to go apple picking this Fall, all of which have fallen through. Rodney had to travel on Sunday and left us with no plans and a full day to explore.

We decided to leave for a last-minute trip to Warwick, NY for some apple picking, worried that the season would slip by without a visit. And after spending 30 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main thoroughfare that links our lake house in northern New Jersey to the Southernmost part of the Hudson Valley, we pulled the ripcord and made other plans.

We’d passed by a small farm called L&L and rather than sitting in more traffic, we pulled over to see what they had to offer.

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Although the apple orchard wasn’t open for picking, bushels of apples were available for purchase, and off in the distance I spotted a pumpkin patch. After our visit to Heaven Hill, we’d bought our fair share of pumpkins, but the kids were eager to find another, having drawn all over our existing pumpkins with a set of highly-guarded Sharpies. How they get a hold of these markers is a mystery; one of their magical talents seems to be finding Sharpies from hiding places that I’d previously thought undiscoverable.

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We loaded up on fruit…

Fruit Collage

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And bought a few decorated pumpkins…

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