The Rings That Bind or Bond

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The Rings that Bind or Bond 


When I saw the entwined rings, I immediately thought of the vows that bind two lives into one from this day forward, forsaking all others and you know the rest.  It took my wandering mind to a place I haven't visited for many years. Well, not that I haven't talked about it or joked about it, but I actually hadn't contemplated the meaning or the long term affect of that day.  The day Mike and I promised each to the other a lifetime of being "ONE".

We exchanged vows in the early evening following a very late night at our local watering hole where we celebrated a bit too much with some old friends.  The lingering results were still very evident during the small and quick ceremony.  To be honest, neither us remember much of the actual ceremony, but our minister did give us a copy of the vows we swore before God and those 4 witnesses to uphold from that day forward. So ignorance would not be an excuse here.


I am not sure either of us has become the other, but what we have done is turned two very different people who lived very different lives into a couple (one) that share all of our differences as much as we share all of our mutual loves.  We didn't become one person, we became one couple.  We became the united pair that function as individuals to accomplish the life we both hope to have.  The life we are working toward everyday. We both want a comfortable golden era together.  We both want to be able to travel out of Michigan winters and into sun, somewhere.  Somewhere like Arizona, the ultimate destination for our twilight years.

Some years it has been easy to stay focused and on the same page.  Some years I felt we were struggling to find one path we could both walk.  Some years were combination packs of unity and separateness.  In short, we are kinda normal.  We have good times and difficult times in our history of 29 years as a married couple.  Today finds us preparing for his retirement at the end of the year and hoping that it will all work out.  Hoping that we aren't in a food line somewhere a couple years down the road.  Hoping that gas won't be $10 a gallon and traveling will mean going 2 miles for dinner out.  Not worrying, mind you, just hoping.  Whatever the next years bring, we will be together and we will be relatively happy.  I know this because our happiness or lack of it will always be for us to choose or not.  I know that we both love the other and we both care about the other's wishes and needs.  I know that neither of us would choose someone else to share this life with, if we could do that.  We often refer to each other as, "My last chance for romance" because, well, it's true!

Our rings do bind us together, but our love bonds us to each other.  Our vows were taken and accepted as a forever thing and 'til death do us part is what we believe.

So bound and bonded, we move forward through this life and into the next.  This is the person I most want to share everything with and most want to see first thing and last thing, everyday.  Our entwined rings signify the unbroken circle of love bound together in an unbreakable bond.

Choices brought us here and choices are binding us together forever.  That's a good thing!  

Jo