Only love, only love can leave such a mark/but only love can heal such a scar  (U2)

“I know you do everything because you love me, but could you just love me a little less?”             Evan Almighty

I’m thinking about what “perfect” means because it’s a word you hear a lot when you are planning a wedding: the perfect day, the perfect dress, the perfect ring. Thank God the BF has known me long enough to entertain no illusions about having the perfect bride. But perfection too often seems to be our standard, and that expectation always leads to the land of disappointment.  So I’m working on embracing the imperfect, which is to say, life.

If I could pick a weekend to land softly upon after the thrill of an engagement weekend, this last one would be it.  A Saturday blizzard meant a Sunday in the snow, and we took advantage.  Dragging ourselves all the way downtown to South Street Seaport to check out the tree, walking to Amex’s Winter Garden to behold the lights, devouring bacon cheese fries at Southwest NY and wrapping it all up with a Tim Keller Christmas sermon.  Solid.  And today, I ran in Central Park surrounded by white instead of the gray slush that now paves the streets of the city.  I headed to the reservoir path, which started off ice-free…then not so much.  A thick blanket of hard-packed snow covered the length of the path and I decided to see how my feet would handle this challenge.  Pretty well, it turned out.  At first.  In fact, I actually had the following exchange with myself:  “There’s nothing to this!  Sure, it’s a little slippery, but it looks like I’ve found my footing and compensated for the slickness and now I AM TOTALLY ROCKING THIS RUN!”  At that moment, my ankle turned and my arms flew out and I barely kept myself from flailing to the ground.  And then, with all body parts intact, I practiced one of the recent abilities I have developed: that of laughing at myself.  Foot-finding can be tricky…and short-lived.

Mom and Dad are arriving tomorrow and I plan on taking them to the park, where I will pummel their asses with snowballs.  We will discuss wedding plans and probably argue because we do that well.  In the end we’ll have a flawed, great visit and next summer there will be a wedding that will be perfectly imperfect.  Anything else wouldn’t be our style–or His.