Five
years ago today I wrote a post to mark our forty-fifth wedding anniversaryand Grandson#2’s eleventh birthday. In the
years since then, we have sold our home of over forty years and moved down into
the valley, where we are now very happily settled. Today Grandson#2 reaches the
advanced age of sixteen, whilst DH and I pinch ourselves to be sure we aren’t
dreaming that fifty years really have passed since that wet April Monday in
Oxford when the two of us were married.
As
soon as I sat down to try to to think of words to sum up those fifty years, I
was swamped by so many memories, happy, sad, funny, serious, mundane or truly extraordinary,
that I despaired of distilling them into anything shorter than a sizeable book.
Instead I turned, as I do increasingly as the years pass, to images, to the
photographs which have chronicled the fifty years of our life together, as our
children were born, grew up and went out into the world and in their turn found
partners and settled down to produce a new generation.
By
and large these years have been good ones, for which we are both very grateful.
There have been difficulties and sorrows, but they have been balanced by joys
and the satisfaction of work and other interests and now by the contentment of our life together in our seventies. My hope is that these snapshots
will give you a at least a flavour of what those fifty years have meant to us
both.
Image: Crucifixion, part of a series depicting the stations of the Cross. Chapel Nosso Senhor dos Passos, Santa Casa de Misericórdia of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Oil on canvas, 19th century, unknown artist.
Music: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) Stabat Mater (1736)