Milkshakes and basil

I went on a date with my husband on Sunday. For us, a date happens pretty much any time we manage to convince someone else to watch the kids.

Week before last, we went on a date at the cafeteria in the building where I work. Not so romantic, but thrilling just the same to have uninterrupted adult conversation.

But on Sunday, we had a real date. My wonderful sparkly little sister is visiting from Germany, and she and my mother volunteered to play with Cheeks and Bee while dear husband and I went to the garden center.

Not the movies. Not to a fancy restaurant. We went to the garden center.

It sounds awfully boring, I know, but I can't tell you how excited I was at the prospect of browsing the aisles without worrying about a pair of little hands decapitating a prize peony.

On the way there, my husband turned to me and said, how about we grab a milkshake? Now, I can't remember the last time I even drank a milkshake, but before you could say banana split we were walking into the little burger place near our house.

I ordered vanilla with crushed oreos. Dear husband decided on a root beer float.

Back in the car, we slurped our milkshakes in companionable silence. Just being at ease together is probably one of the nicest things about being married for almost nine years.

On Saturday, I went wedding dress shopping with my little sister. We went to the same small store where I had bought my wedding dress at the tender age of 21. I proudly told the owner of the shop that I had brought her a new customer and related my warm memories of picking out a dress nearly a decade ago. She laughed, and then asked, "So, how's it going, the marriage?"

"Very well," I replied.

I reflected on this as we walked through the nursery and picked out herbs to grow on our back patio. Two kinds of basil for homemade pizza margherita. Mint for my husbands' mint juleps. Sage for roast chicken. Two strawberry plants, just because. Dear husband also bought me new clay pots and big bags of potting soil. What I know, after nine years, is that love doesn't have to be flashy. Sometimes its as simple as fresh basil and sweet as cold vanilla ice cream.

When we returned home, we found the girls happily playing in the front yard with my Mom and sister. I set to work filling the new pots. Cheeks McGoo loved digging with a child sized spade. Miss Bee took wearing her garden gloves very seriously.

Dear husband watched my gardening with great bemusement, knowing that my black thumb will no doubt inflict calamity on our purchases. I will surely forget to water one plant and accidentally another. I checked on my green charges after work today, and, surprisingly, all seemed to have recovered from being transported and transplanted. Perhaps this will be my lucky year in the garden.

Lost and Found

When I travel I like to buy souvenirs that I will use on a regular basis. I like things that remind me of the places I have been, yet have a function.

As a result of my peripatetic life, I have a stack of thick wool blankets from Guatemala, hand carved wooden spoons from Latvia, and table linens from Romania. I also have a pair of prized woolen mittens from Estonia.

The Estonians, they know cold. They also know their sheep and how to spin a thick, soft wool unlike any I have ever found anywhere else in the world. On a trip to Tallinn way back in the winter of 2005, I bought a pair of double lined wool gray mittens at an outdoor market . They sustained me through -30 Fahrenheit weather in Riga and weeks of snow in Bucharest.

Last Friday I emerged from the metro and my regular "it's Friday and I really need something to get me going" trip to Starbucks. (This rationale actually works quite well for every day of the week.) I reached into my purse to put on my mittens and only found one.

You know that child's poem about the three little kittens? Well, I spent the rest of the weekend meowing and searching for my lost mitten. It was ridiculous really, a small unimportant thing in the grand scale of things. But since I have had children I feel like I have lost entire continents without knowing. And that really irks me.

And thinking back to that now long ago trip to Estonia, I remembered driving back from Tallinn with my husband, in the no-man's-land on the border between Estonia and Latvia. It was there, on a long gray road tended by surly border guards that I came to the decision that I was ready to become a mother. Why there, I don't know. Maybe the car trip was just too uneventful with just two adults. But after that trip we decided to have a baby and I had Miss Bee and the mittens were somehow inextricably wrapped up in all that.

But then I found the missing mitten today, in the restroom at work. Miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously, the cleaning crew did not throw it away over the weekend, and some helpful person placed it right on the mirror where I would find it. And I am embarrassed to admit that I rejoiced.

It is the little things, you know? A lost mitten found; a handmade card from my daughter; a dinner alone with my husband . . . There are just so many small joys in life that are too easily overlooked.

The best part

about being married is that my husband spoils me.

He knows that I hate to walk the dog when it's cold outside so he does it without complaint.

Since he is painfully aware that I am not a morning person so he leaps out of bed when Cheeks wakes up and changes the first diaper of the day.

He makes me popcorn in his beloved cast iron pan and pancakes on the weekend.

He encourages my hobbies, from baking bread to teaching Sunday school.

And when life gets a little too crazy, he knows how to calm it all down.