Funny, I use to believe that my life experience wouldn’t be complete without the really good stuff. The big trips, the weekends away, the theater tickets—taking in all the big events. I thought that I was missing something. Missing out on life, somehow.

 

When you and I first intertwined our lives together, we just didn’t have the wherewithal to make it all happen. We pinched pennies. Literally. We scrimped and saved. I made my own Christmas garland that first year from popcorn and cranberries and fragrant fir boughs that I found in the wooded lot behind our apartment building, and I thought I had hit it rich. I couldn’t believe that my ordinary hands could bring together such minimal items so as to make what I deemed my first crafty masterpiece. I never thought I had it in me.

I remember that I was more creative that year, more intent on finding ways to personalize and do it all up homemade-style. I made you a jar of Hershey’s kisses with notes attached. It took forever, but I think it was perhaps more meaningful than handing you a gift card.

You and I, we have forged together lives that are intent on honest, down-home, uncomplicated living.

You took me on picnics and we shared fries with the works for our second anniversary date. We bought our first and only antique brass bed that we literally had to build the house around, having shared that bed for nineteen years and counting now. Purchased from simple country folk ‘down along’. You built me shelves and mirrors and apothecary cupboards from the old elm tree that was felled in our front yard.

And together we have raised a busy growing family— country-style, for fifteen years and counting.

 

The years have passed while we’ve lived out these simple, mundane lives of ours. So much has changed and yet so little. We have more at our disposal, certainly. Experience, tenure and opportunity have allowed for this. And yet, we still crave the simple. Walks on quiet roads that face into the sunset, a sturdy lawn chair with a good book in hand, a cold glass of lemonade. We still do simple.

We’d still choose this.

And isn’t that the best there is in life, anyway? Isn’t this the good stuff?

Patches of sunlight on smiling faces just before dusk. Our friends and family gathered close. A roof overhead and four walls all around.

 

We don’t need extravagant when we’ve been afforded all of this.

No, we don’t do fancy.

And given the choice, we’d still prefer the simple life we’ve been handed… again and again and again.

We’d choose simple every time.