Special day

It astonishes me, as I look back over my years of blogging, how often I fail to note the specialness of June 7th in our household. I did it again yesterday. It is Mary and my anniversary (this year our 24th), Leslie's birthday and also Natalie's birthday, this year her 21st. A big day. One of the kids, probably Graham, used to refer to it as "Junior 7th" out of respect for the awe it inspires in our household.

Yesterday night, just before bedtime, it occurred to me that I should at the very least post a bunch of pictures of Natalie on Facebook on the occasion of her 21st. So I started going through my photo files here on my laptop. It wasn't too hard to find a bunch of good pictures of Natalie, since she has after all been beautiful her whole life, if somehow a little blurry or backlit in many of the pictures I've taken through the years, for some reason.

There were also a ton of pictures of Mary in there, and I don't know why I was surprised at how good she looks through the years. It's likely because I've seen her in all states of tousledness and with the imprint of pillowcases and whatnot on her face, at all moments of varying ill temper and the like. It is easy to forget how lovely one's spouse is. I would have posted a collage of these to Facebook, but I know better than to do so without getting pre-clearance from her for each picture.

I also came across a small trove of videos from 2011 of the kids playing around in our rental house and other stuff. I'm a little sad I don't have more video of them at various stages. We have plenty of pictures and I've tried to blog a lot, but there is something breathtakingly full about the moving image. Of course, I have been constrained by Graham's outright aversion to video that he picked up somewhere along the way, perhaps because Mary shot so many still images of him. Also, I've often thought that others have been so obsessed with capturing everything on video that they can't be present in the moment in which they find themselves. Still, I'm glad I have what I have.