A year in
the making.

It’s snowing hard and you are outside doing something to the gutters that did not need doing, because you would rather be useful than sit still and be told you’re loved.

I have tried saying it out loud twice this week and both times you got up to fetch something.

So I’m putting it where you can’t wander off mid-sentence: I love you. That’s the whole letter. Now come inside before you freeze.

We had that dumb fight Tuesday — the dishwasher, or whatever it was actually about — and you still brought me tea before bed like nothing happened.

I stayed mad four more minutes on principle. You just let things go. I hold onto everything and you set it down.

I’m trying to learn that from you. Slowly. Don’t get smug.

We took the long way home on Sunday and got properly lost — no signal, half a tank, none of the roads going where the signs promised.

You rolled the windows down and said we’d either get there or we’d see something new. Then we found a farm stand selling the worst pie either of us has ever eaten.

Worst pie, best afternoon. That’s us, honestly — no map, decent snacks, working it out as we go. I’d get lost with you anywhere.

You gave up a whole Saturday to help my dad rebuild the shed, and at dinner he still introduced you to the neighbour as “the tall one”. Four years in.

You just laughed. But I noticed he’d put you in the armchair, which nobody else is allowed to sit in, and I don’t think that was an accident.

Thank you for being patient with my family, especially the difficult ones. It isn’t nothing, and I see it even when they don’t.

You alphabetized the spice rack. Nobody asked you to. I found the cumin filed under C and stood there grinning like an idiot.

Ridiculous, tiny thing, and it undid me a little.

Nobody warns you that this is what love turns out to be — mostly cumin. Somebody quietly making your ordinary day better and never bringing it up.

Confession: I love your awful humming. The same two lines every morning while you shave, never once the right key, and I would not change it.

You warm the car before I’m up. You leave me the last of the coffee and act like you didn’t want it — I see you, by the way.

I’ve never told you I notice these things. I do. All of them. Don’t start doing them louder now that you know — you’ll ruin it.

Sat out on the porch last night until the ice went to water in our glasses and we barely said a word.

You had that look — miles away and completely here at the same time.

Turns out I don’t need you to be interesting. I just like being next to you while the neighbors’ sprinklers tick on. My favorite thing is still doing nothing with you.

The AC quit in the worst week of the heat and you didn’t gripe once — just rigged the box fans up in some cockeyed way that shouldn’t have worked and did.

We slept on top of the covers like a couple of kids. I was miserable and somehow also happy?

You turn problems into adventures. I don’t say that enough, so: thank you.

You did the cat voice again — that absurd little accent you’ve decided she has — and I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

Nobody else gets that version of you. The world sees the serious guy who fixes everything; I get the man narrating the cat’s inner life at seven in the morning.

Please never stop being that dumb with me.

I won’t pretend this was an easy month. You found out on a Tuesday that your job was going, and you went very quiet, and I didn’t have anything useful to say — so I just stayed close and hoped that counted.

You told me later that it did. What I keep coming back to is that even that week, with everything sliding, you still asked how my day had been. Every single night.

That’s the whole measure of you, and it’s why I’m not frightened. We’re going to be fine. I mean it.

You burned the rolls, swore at the oven, and it was the best Thanksgiving I can remember.

Everybody crammed in the kitchen, your terrible playlist going, my sister crying at something on the TV.

You caught my eye across all of it and just nodded — like, we made this. We did. Most of what I’m grateful for this year is just you, in the next room.

I keep trying to sum up the year and getting stuck, because the year wasn’t the big things. It was the coffee you always leave me, and the humming through the bathroom door, and that hot week we slept on top of the covers with the fans going.

So here’s the plain version, no cleverness: it was a good year because you were in it. They all are.

I love you more than I did last January, which I didn’t think was available to me, and I expect I’ll love you more still by next December. Thank you for this ordinary, extraordinary life.