a billet-doux to Bachelor No. 2

This year, my house turns 100. I'm not sure when, exactly, it was built -- I keep meaning to get down to wherever it is that they keep records about this sort of thing, so that I can find out who its builders and first owners were, how many owners there've been over the years, that sort of thing, but first I have to find out where it is I have to go, and then I actually have to do the research, and it's not that I don't want to do those things, but you know how it is, there's always something more important to do first -- but the tax assessor assures me it was in 1910 (it also tells me that my carport is in Poor Condition, which feels unnecessarily judgmental to me, but that's another story), so here I am, celebrating my anniversary with a decrepit old man whose aches and pains and annoyances are legion, but whom I love with a pretty fierce devotion. We've been together four years now. It hardly seems possible: not only does it not seem as though it's been that long since I paid the movers and collapsed on the unmade bed that first night, but also I have not actually lived in one place longer than this one since we moved away from my childhood home in 1985.

I celebrated my fourth anniversary by rearranging rooms. Let me clear on this, okay? I am not a habitual rearranger; before a couple of weeks ago, my furniture was still in the places I put it when it entered the house, and I'd thought I was happy for things to stay the way they were until I moved or died, whichever came first. But one morning I woke up with this irrational urge to move the dining room into the study and vice versa, and I wasn't going to do it but I suddenly realized that this is my house and I can move my furniture anywhere I like and stuff like that, and so I did, and man, it was as though I'd unexpectedly had a new house dropped on top of the old one. I spend a lot of my time in the study, and I am so pleased to be in this new space, which is cozier and warmer and has a ceiling fan and a crazy fireplace and lots of books and actually looks like a study rather than a reception office, and there is a certain time of day, between about 12:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon, when the sun is in just the right place to shine directly on me through the windows at my back, and it is the best place in the world to be just then.

So there's that, and then there's the three inches of snow we got over the weekend. When I woke up on Saturday morning and went into the kitchen to grab the dog's bowl, I happened to look up out of the kitchen windows, and the woods behind my house were all barren and frozen and white, and it looked like nothing I had ever seen before in my life (outside of a movie), and certainly not anything I ever expected to see looking out of my kitchen window at 7:00 in the morning, but there it was, and I guess this is my point, that even after four years, it is still possible to be surprised, still possible to fall in love all over again.