Old Love

On Thursday, September 23rd, this year's autumnal equinox and September's full moon, Jeremiah and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary. In honor of all the time gone by, we dumped our children on Steve and Joy for 4 days and fled to near-by Tybee Island for some us-time. We were badly in need of the break.

We stayed in a pink cottage just 99 steps away from the beach. On that first night, when the moon was just shy of full, we laid in the sand and saw 2 shooting stars. The cabin, which was all one room with a couple divided segments, also had a second building right out back named The Roost. We slept there, in what used to be a ticket booth, surrounded on all sides by windows, some of which looked out over the ocean.

On Friday, we spent the first half of the day on a sea kayak, taking a guided tour of the creeks in the marsh, and a beach walk on the uninhabited Little Tybee. That rocked. We weren't even half way through our tour of all the creeks, listening to our guide tell us all about the Georgia coast (which is tiny, but amazing) when we realized we should have signed up for a full day trip, instead of half. But, since we did have half a day left, we went to the beach and lounged like snakes on rocks in the sun. Then cooked some fresh seafood and did more lounging, this time with wine.

Saturday, at my urging, we took a death defying bikeride all the way from our cottage into Savannah and back. This really deserves its own post. We used the path that Google Maps suggested. Thanks, Google, for taking us through the nastiest ghetto in which I've ever had the pleasure of fearing for my life. When we reached our destination (lunch!) we could plainly see that if we hadn't taken that right turn on Skidaway, we could have instead sailed past rows of genteel homes canopied under Spanish Moss (which we learned on our kayak trip, is neither Spanish, nor moss. Discuss). At any rate, now that I'm nearly a week out from that adventure it seems like it was a lot of fun. Jeremiah was with me, so I had fun.

On the day of our anniversary, we did a lot of relaxing. That made us hungry. That evening we drove into Savannah and dined at Elizabeth's on Thirty-Seventh. It was lovely. We brought the bottle of wine we'd been saving for 10 years, crossed our fingers and popped it open. It was tasty! It was also very, very heavy and in the heat of the evening, down south in the swamp, heavy wasn't cutting it for me. Still, it was awfully fun to bust that thing open. We marveled at all we've done over the past decade. Then we marveled some more as we realized my parents have had nearly 5 times the years of marriage we have. Then we fell silent, both of us reflecting, no doubt, on the fact that we accidentally did it all in the first 10, now we're out of things to talk about. Nothing left for us but the heavy drinking and maybe some getting fat.

When Sunday arrived, it was time to pack up and go home. The truth is, we missed our kids an awful lot. Were it not for them, we might have just...stayed. On cue, the weather turned from sunny and hot to cloudy and humid, time to take our leave of the beach. We arrived at Steve & Joy's house to fetch our children, and they'd made us a Welcome Home Mom & Dad banner and hung it on the front porch. It was all very sweet. By the time we finally got them and the puppy home and began to unpack, the girls were fighting. Sarah hit Kate and later threw a DVD case at her. Kate pouted. Ah yes, home sweet home.