Things large and small

I dropped off my family diamond at our jewelry designer's shop today, after a long drive through heavy rain.  I also bought twenty envelopes, and a mediocre lunch at a brewpub with the big-screen silently playing NASCAR qualifying laps at some inconsequential minor-league track.

It's funny, the kinds of large and small decisions that we make.  I've played a large role in designing the ring that Nora will wear for the rest of her life, and I've also worked with her to decide that the CMYK formula for the font color on our invitations is 14/65/96/38.  We bought six or seven spools of ribbon last weekend to see which we liked best as an accent to a particular set of cards, and we drag our long-suffering real estate agent through one showing after another.

We replace cars, we replace paper towels.  We shop for a house, we shop for cat litter.  I take a call about a gift registry, and I take a call from a friend who wants a hand in writing her mother's eulogy.  We don't always get to choose the scale of the questions we're asked to resolve.

I hang the toilet paper over the top of the roll, and Nora usually hangs it from the bottom.  We've bought eight or ten brands of prosecco, and open a new bottle a couple of times a week to see which brand we want at the wedding.  (We agree more on the prosecco than on the toilet paper...)

I'm shy, and Nora is... well, you know.  She was driving to Vermont yesterday and an indicator light lit up on the dashboard.  She called, we tried a couple of things, and I ended up calling ahead to the Nissan dealership in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where she would be in about half an hour.  While she was waiting for Georgia to be serviced, she cajoled a salesman into giving her an open-throttle ride in a new 370Z roadster.

We do both like the Z.  And we both name our cars: Georgia for the Georgia O'Keefe desert-sky blue of the Rogue, and Habi for the Si's Habañero Red Pearl.  No gray cars around our house.  "Are we taking Habi or Georgia to work?"  Nora drives faster than I as a general practice, but I have the sports car.

The diamond came from my mother's ring.  Not a wedding ring, exactly; a ring that she inherited from her grandmother, with three diamonds that were cut and polished in the field.  A ring sold to the Averill family by Krautheim Jewelers, probably as Frank's ring to his new bride Elsie in 1892.  The diamond outlasted Frank and Elsie, outlasted Krautheim Jewelers, outlasted the economic viability of the city they both called home.  And now it will have a new setting, a new hand, a new marriage to mark. 

We do our jobs.  We do the dishes.  We write essays, e-mails, checks, shopping lists.  For Christmas, I've bought her snow tires, a chainsaw, a socket set.  And necklaces, jewelry boxes, art.

I listen to music while I work, and Nora needs silence.  She drinks coffee, I drink tea.  I rise early and get my best work done before noon; she rises late, and works best after dinner.

She can't abide cauliflower, I can't abide sweet potatoes.

We're both grown-ups, with the habits that many decades instill in us all.  But we're also grown up enough to know which habits matter, and which ones we can laugh at and set aside, and which ones we can learn from and adopt and become greater than we were.  We know which ones make us into us.