Nine Years of Love, Life, and the Northern Lights

On the Eve of our 9th wedding anniversary I found myself taking photos around our house of the home we’ve built together.

I don’t have many words this year, but the photos tell the story in their own powerful way.

While I’ve lacked words to celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary I wrote a poem a couple weeks before. Visiting family had us under the northern Idaho sky where we unexpectedly took in the Aurora Borealis right before our eyes.

Though we were busy visiting family, it still had been an ordinary day of being a wife and mom, of living our life side by side.

We were tired. I was sick as I always am during pregnancies. It’d been weeks of getting through each day best I could.

But there we were.

Under the Northern Lights, anyway.

Northern Lights would fall in
your lap
unexpectedly
in May
in the midst of all
the normal things
and life routines
that come with being
a wife and mom.
a sky of stars and reddish moon
of pink and green and
you and him
standing beneath
phenomenon.
and sure you’ve never seen
the Lights,
but you’ve seen all this
before
nearly nine years in
a story
laden down
by tear-smudged ink
and dog-eared pages
laughter in the dark
lament in the light
pressing sorrow
and bright loud joy,
unexpected phenomena
in the crux
of life and love
and just before
midnight.

-S.V.F., Phenomena

And so the poem, Phenomena and all these photos will say all the words I can’t seem to find this year.

Nine years of home. Nine years of us. Nine years of Lights in the midst of sickness and health, in our seasons of rich and poor, in our days better and worse.