Thoughts on commitment...

Maybe it’s odd considering my activities of late, but I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage.

Maybe it’s because the vineyard is, in part, a tribute to my brother’s late wife and thus her name has surfaced often as we’ve toiled in the black soil. It was her idea, this vineyard, and we joked often over the last weeks about how she was probably looking down on us from Heaven, either laughing at our ineptitude, or simply shaking her head muttering, “I was kidding!”

Or, maybe I’ve been thinking about marriage because Dick and Anne celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary by helping us on planting day – he with a sledgehammer in his hand helping my hubby set posts; she on her hands and knees fashioning roots in a long row of dark, damp holes.

Probably, though, I’m thinking about marriage because this venture — or adventure or, perhaps, misadventure — this process of taking a large piece of ground and turning it productive without the benefit of a tractor or farming experience has required hubby and I to apply ourselves to a commitment larger than ourselves. With it, has come both joy and frustration as we’ve faced adversity together and overcome. This project, this commitment to our vineyard has, as I look back on the last several weeks, seemed as epic as entering the covenant of marriage.

In both cases – in establishing a vineyard or in committing to another for life – it’s clear: a half-hearted effort doesn’t cut it. And in both cases, in farming and in marriage, expect sore muscles, dirty fingernails, flared tempers, setbacks, and sunny afternoons in which to eat pizza on the grass.

The most likely reason marriage has been on my mind of late, though, is that in the middle of the most intensive part of building or planting this vineyard (both verbs apply), hubby and I celebrated our wedding anniversary; we both remembered but he was the only one who thought ahead and planned a gift. Hubby is like that.

On our anniversary, May 4, 2008, hubby gave me the sign above which is now planted outside the vineyard. It was a great gift, but not his greatest. Twenty-nine years earlier, on May 4, 1979, he gave me a life.