To Paula, my bride,
Twenty-eight years. The number gets older and heavier with history, but my love for you has never been freer and lighter. For a long time, marriage felt like a destination to strive for and arrive at. What a joke, it’s been the greatest adventure of my life. We were just kids, younger than Piper, complete idiots. ὁ δὲ θεός, it’s been the greatest gift to grow up with you and beside you.
We started with those huge dreams, the sweet, young, idealistic ones. The kind that takes you to faraway lands and also into food lines. And then seven years later, thinking it may never be our fortune, children were given. Our collective that rooted and focused us on what really matters. Raising kids is no joke; nothing harder, nothing more rewarding. So many moments, so many stories. But the real marriage magic, not the big, glorious, or inglorious moments. It’s the morning coffee, the bathroom conversations through a shower curtain, the shared looks across a crowded room, the everyday steady construction of a life together, stone by stone.
We live in a culture of relentless noise; it’s loud, exhausting, demanding. You’ve always been my freedom, my fortress of love. You are the very space where the performance ends and the authentic self begins. In the mess, in the beauty, you are my space to be me.
Nearly three decades of building things that matter to us, but none of it; the callings, the projects, the business, and not even the kids, compare to the sanctuary we have cultivated between us. It is a sacred and rare gift of grace. Thank you for the grace of your presence, the gift of your heart, and the privilege of being loved by you. The marriage we have is a gift that outshines everything built.
Happy 28th Anniversary, I love you.