Twenty-five Year Celebration and a Draft Poem

Michael and I are coming up on a 25th wedding anniversary and we are thinking about celebrating in a big way, so far we have agreed on a real honeymoon. We were married back in 1986, both 22 years old. We worked for a grocery store chain and had a total budget of 1000 dollars for our wedding. Money my handsome man made available by selling his Fiat X-19 he had been painstakingly been restoring. Amazingly we had a beautiful wedding, I recycled bridesmaid dresses, borrowed my dear friend Bonnie's wedding dress and Momma made my wedding cake. Bonnie and I made all of the flowers and decorations. We had the wedding in the Methodist church I grew up in, much to the dismay of Michael's Catholic parents (they forgave me later-they always treated me like their own daughter). Out oldest friends Bonnie and David threw us a big party following the church reception at their first home. Michael and I had two days off and we went to Galveston for our honeymoon. I was a pretty reluctant bride, my parents divorced when I was 15 and I watched my Momma work two jobs to put food on the table. I was unconvinced that marriage was a good deal for a woman. I loved Michael and he grew up in a home with parents who had been married more than 35 years, and it was his insistence, how he talked about his parents coupled with my love for him that allowed me to take that leap. Honestly we were babies pretending to be grown-ups, but I knew that day walking down the aisle as I saw him smile, that I made the right choice. Our marriage has not always been easy, but it's a good marriage, a strong marriage, a love-filled marriage, one that I am proud of, one I choose to celebrate. I am in the process of scanning some of our wedding photos, and will be posting them over the next week or so. The photo at the top a wedding dress I like(it's the top runner) for when we renew our vows. We are still deciding if we are going to do it just ourselves on our honeymoon or have a small ceremony with our friends. A poem I wrote for My Michael (a draft poem like most of mine)

If You Want to Know Why

Not the sputter of the engine
a Fiat Beretone X-19 on cinder blocks, or
the thick streak of oil across his nose
as he breathed life into dreams roaring
inside his head. Nor the dog-eared pages
of hand drawn modifications.

Four hundred dollar Italian-English manuals,
carefully labeled diagrams, pencil marks,
micrometer readings or how he sat
cross-legged books in lap,
in the middle of the water bed.

Not, the speech he gave me
on the Art of fine-tuning a motor,
his smile that first day the engine purred.

It's wasn't the orange flare of the nitrous oxide booster,
or the sonic boom when it engaged, the moon, the wind
or the Targa top down on the way to the lake;

or the sound of rubber slapping pavement,
the sensation of being airborne at one hundred
miles an hour. Not even the glorious freedom
of moving at the speed of sound; or the feel of water
against bare skin, or the heat of hot metal on my back.

It was later, a shoestring slipped through an oil plug;
he hung from my neck, a story with the use of a metaphor
of how he drilled it out of the oil tank; to unfreeze a clutched motor.
Ten one hundred bills in a white envelope, pushed into my hand;
one word; in precise script: underlined: wedding
and the sounds of hands clapping in an empty garage.