08/20/2026
"Where Red Meets Green"
(Happy Anniversary, my love)
Four years ago today,
I stood beside you
and made a promise
without knowing every mountain
we would have to climb.
That is the strange beauty of marriage.
You do not get to see the whole trail
before you begin.
You only get the person beside you,
their hand reaching for yours,
and the quiet decision
to keep walking.
And somehow, Leslie,
through every changing season,
we have.
I look at this picture of us
standing at Lake Louise,
with mountains rising behind us
like the edges of the world,
and water so blue
it hardly seems real.
But the most beautiful thing
in that photograph
is not the lake.
It is not the mountains.
It is not the distance we travelled
to stand there.
It is us.
Two people smiling
in the middle of something enormous,
still choosing to stand close.
Your favourite colour is red.
The colour of warmth.
Of courage.
Of a heart that refuses
to love quietly.
Mine is green.
The colour of roots.
Of growth.
Of life returning
after a difficult winter.
And maybe that is what we have always been.
You, the fire
that reminds me to feel.
Me, the ground
still learning how to grow.
Red and green.
Different colours,
different ways of moving through this world,
but stitched into the same life now.
Not blending until we disappear.
Not asking the other
to become something they are not.
Just learning how to exist
side by side,
equally seen,
equally held.
Because love was never supposed
to erase our colours.
It was supposed to make them brighter.
Four years of laughter.
Four years of change.
Four years of finding out
that marriage is not one promise
made on one beautiful day.
It is a thousand smaller promises
made when nobody is watching.
I am still here.
I still see you.
I still choose this.
I still choose us.
And when I see our faces
reflected in those glasses,
I realize the reflection
is not only showing where we have been.
It is showing what we have built.
A life where the mountains
have not always moved for us,
but we have learned
how to climb them together.
A love that has been tested
by distance, by change,
by everything life placed
between who we were
and who we are becoming.
Yet here we stand.
Still red.
Still green.
Still ourselves.
But no longer alone.
Happy fourth anniversary, Leslie.
If I could return
to the edge of that impossible blue water,
I would stand beside you again
and make the same choice.
Not because the road has been easy.
Because through every turn,
every climb,
and every season,
you are still the person
I want reflected beside me
when I look back
at the life I have lived.
