a decade under the influence

I love marking the passage of time. I’m big on birthdays and anniversaries. I have so many anniversaries with my husband — the day we started talking online, the day we met in person, the day he moved here, our wedding anniversary — he stopped paying attention to them all together. I mark anniversaries of vacations, album release dates, break ups.

So it is with great interest I watch as people roll out their “best of the 10s” lists as this decade rolls to a close. Best albums, best songs and books and articles, best startups and inventions and breakdowns and romances. There’s a list for everything. Me, I’m starting to look back at what the last decade has been like for me, personally. What did I accomplish? What did I do with the last ten years?

I’ve been through a lot this decade. There were some really down times but they were tempered by good things, as life goes. We fought through my husband’s alcoholism and came through it on the other side, not unscathed, but unbending in our devotion to each other. We got married, right before things went to hell. We went through some financial strife. We sold our house, moved into a basement apartment in what was my grandparents’ house, then turned around our lives and our fortunes and bought that house. We went to Barcelona twice this decade and those two trips contain some of my fondest memories of those years. I rode out a superstorm at my parents’ house because we had no electricity for two weeks.