First year down.

Friday was our first anniversary. DH and I have been married for one year, together for more than five (oh my! when I met him I was still legitimately 22 years old!!!), and living in the same house for most of the last four.
But oh, - you know what, let's just, for the sake of gravity, put a period there - oh. What a year this last one has been.
Like almost every year when you look back on it, it seems like "whoa, time flew!". But there is something contradictory about this feeling, because it has been a year so loaded with experiences of the sort that in order to be absorbed need time – if at all anything can help you comprehend the incomprehensible, digest the cold lumps of earth that life sometimes puts on your plate. But from wedding to funeral in seven and a half months, to mention just the very tip of the top-of-the-list mega-events of one's life – forget about moving to a different country where it rains in the summer and my family is in a different time zone so my 86 year old grandmother (!) calls on the eve of our anniversary (!!!) to say mazal tov and that she's been thinking of us and I want to stop everything and cry but mainly just stop everything for a little, just have time move more slowly so I can take a look at life and be perplexed (which is probably what this blog is for). Yeah, forget that – this year has been moving in an almost out of hand haste. Not that farewells from your 32 year old sister can ever be other than untimely, and I mean something you simply never have enough time for. N parted the world calmly, after quite literally making it to all her deadlines, while we were all out of breath. Stay. Just a little bit longer.


One of the directors at DirectorsLab, during her closing remarks, told us how just hours after her father died, she realized life was really in the relations between people, and while this sounds somehow lame now that I'm reproducing this here, it was very moving how she said it, and I think she was touching precisely on this, on how you use your time on earth to connect to another human being. That that is what makes your time alive worthwhile. And as she talked I was getting teary because I thought I'm not sure there was so much life between N and me in that sense and how it's all over now and a piece of life, a piece of my life I could have had, is gone.

Wait, but this was supposed to be an anniversary-celebrating post.
OK. So the person I live with in all senses of the term and possibly spend too much time with, is DH. And you know what else happened this week? Facebook asked me to please confirm my relationship with him and then I get reminders of our anniversary with little red hearts next to them. So, honoring his finally joining me at and sharing our marital status in the Kingdom of Procrastination, here are some other incredible facts I have learned during this year of our "relationship":
That we can communicate using solely our eyebrows and occasional monosyllables.
That he knows what I'm thinking the minute I open the refrigerator without even seeing my face.
That he still loves me despite my obsessiveness about food and the fact that I don't and will never even taste the amazing (so I'm told) roast-beef AND chocolate truffles he makes.
That he will cook for me when I am sick or tired or too busy to obsess about food (this last one does not happen often. But still, good to know).
That really and truly, the one thing he wants most in the world is for me to laugh one of my crazy laughs. Or at least smile.
That I can have a genuine crush on somebody else and know it might mean something but nothing inherently about US, and that I can tell him about it and he will be the coolest, most graciously adorable man on earth.
[While on the subject of crushes/flirts: Over our sushi-anniversary dinner, he asks me if I would date the DJ who played at our wedding and also owns one of the nicer hummus places in Jerusalem. Answer: Hell yeah! But would you bring him home to meet your parents? Answer: hmmmmm……]
That we can have such conversations.
And… I think this last one will also count as a relationship-related thing:
I learned to use a pastry blender to create flaky doughs such as this (not to mention an amazing cherry-pitting technique I learned from the cherry-vendor)




I have almost learned to trust DH enough to do the dishes just fine. But that leaves us something to aspire to for next year.