Three Years

Three years seems like such a long time, but while some hours are longer than others, the days fly by into weeks and months like the whitecaps rolling in off the ocean, and soon where you started is but a speck on the horizon. And yet, every morning that horizon serves its intended purpose, welcoming the sunrise and parting sea from sky as it will all the days to come.

Three years ago today we wed. And so much fun we've had since then, degrees and homes and jobs and dogs and Jack and twice as much family as ever before and all this is still just a drop in the bucket of happiness that awaits the decades to come. At twenty years, will we remember what three felt like? Maybe, maybe not. But I guarantee I'll remember h-hour, d-day. Who could forget that smile?

Three years ago, we passed a little poem out among our friends and family. Legend has it that Robert Frost penned this gem, The Master Speed, for his daughter's wedding.1 And yes, we shamelessly stole it for our own wedding programs' epigraph. And I'll steal it again, year after year. Because, and this will always be the truth: we may not be as fast as we once were, in days of yore / but we are still together, wing to wing and oar to oar.

The Master Speed by Robert Frost

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still—
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

I love you, Kim. Happy Anniversary.

1. "The Master Speed," an epithalamium celebrating the marriage of Frost's daughter Irma to John Cone in 1926, was first published in the Yale Review in 1936 and appeared in A Further Range later that same year. See Nancy Tuten and John Zubizarreta, The Robert Frost Encyclopedia (Greenwood, 2000). An interesting explication of this poem can be found here.