18th Anniversary

Our 18th anniversary flowed happily like the previous 17.  We remembered anniversaries past, snuggled up to our pride in our wedding vows, and acknowledged our dedication to love each other fully every single day.

As an homage to those younger people we once were, here are the vows we wrote 16 years ago.  These are the promises that we made each other in the presence of friends and family, wedding us more strongly than a fee paid to a clerk ever could.

We hereby declare the promises we have made one another.  We invite you all to witness and take part in this celebration of our love.

We promise to work at loving each other.

We promise to take care of each other when we need it, to leave each other alone when we need it, and to ask when we do not know which is needed.

We promise to communicate our needs to the best of our abilities.

We promise to remember that we are individuals.

We promise to weigh each other’s wishes before making decisions concerning each other.

We promise to try to know each other to the fullest extent possible in each phase of growth and change.

We promise to keep these promises fresh and relevant and to keep our love young and new.

And here we are on that day in 1998, at Doe Bay on Orcas Island in the San Juans.  This is a phone pic of a laminated printout of a scanned film photograph.  Quality is low, but I’m glad to have it anyway.