Gale force.

Some years pass quietly, washing gently over you, the turning of the calendar pages the only indication that time is passing at all. Of course things change, but they’re little things. Maybe you have a new favorite pair of shoes, or you’ve fallen in with a new circle of friends, or your body is a bit softer. Surface level stuff.

Then other years blow through at gale force, changing the directions of the street signs, rivers veering off into uncharted territory. Everything is changed. Not just your physical world, but you, yourself, down to your very core. This past year has been one those years for me.

I look back at where I was a year ago today. Tearing my hair out at the height of wedding planning, a week and a half from the big day. Trying to nail down the Purchase and Sale agreement on our house. Not yet a wife, not yet a homeowner.

We hadn’t yet flown in a helicopter over Kauai or leapt from a rope swing into one of her rivers.

I hadn’t left my job to go on a personal odyssey.

We hadn’t spent our first round of holidays together as a married couple.

I hadn’t found my other true love in baking.

I didn’t know what it was to decorate my own house.

We hadn’t loved and lost. We hadn’t hit the bottom. That was the big one. Seeing our first pregnancy fade away before our eyes. Hours spent huddled together on hospital chairs. Everything else was easy. Everything else was nothing, compared to this.

This blew me wide open, left me exposed. I tried to draw back into myself, into the part of my world that felt safe. But I still feel raw from it. Easily hurt, brush the surface and I’ll bleed. Yet I’m harder too, more wary. Gone is that last bit of childish confidence that everything will be alright, which I kept up until the very last moment. Now I know that sometimes? It’s not all right.

I’ve always measured my years in two ways. One turning over in January, the traditional calendar year, the other in September, the school year. And now with our wedding anniversary in September, I’m sure that will continue. Except, instead of the school year, we’ll have the marriage year.

For us, this first year of marriage is drawing to a close. It hasn’t been the easiest, no, but that’s not to say it hasn’t been wonderful at times. One year ago, I wrote about how marriage forces you to grow up. Little did I know then how true that statement would turn out to be, what I’d signed up for. Yet through it all we’ve grown closer still. World spinning around us, we grabbed hold of each others hands and dug our toes in. Together. We hung in there.

Just like we said we would.