Passion Project

A fun family update

Hello Readers,

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Michael asked me to marry him thirty-two years ago on a chilly May afternoon at the Jersey shore. He pulled his mom’s picnic basket out of the trunk of his Delta ‘88 Royale and set up lunch on an old zebra-print comforter. Then he slipped a ring on my finger while I stood beaming in my denim jacket, baby-faced, with wind-whipped hair and sandy bare feet—nary a manicured nail in sight. Pre-internet engagements were a decidedly less aesthetic affair than they are now, but boy did I parade that ring around in real life. There wasn’t a cashier, an ex-boyfriend, a restaurant patron at my job, or a fellow nursing student who didn’t catch an eyeful of that diamond.

Our 30^th anniversary is in June, but we celebrated last week by taking our kids and their partners to Hawaii on a family vacation. It was one of our best trips yet, filled with lush beauty, novelty, great food, sunshine, laughter, and the deepest gratitude for the life we’ve built together.

The past six years have been some of the hardest years we’ve weathered together as a family, but the hard has made Michael and I even more determined to build something that lasts, to reach the edges of this art we’re painting and keep stretching the canvas to include more than our original vision. More depth, more perspective, more color, more everything. Our family life is far more expansive than I ever imagined it would be, and it’s satisfying to look back over the course of thirty years and see that the natural tendency to shrink, to fit into a particular mold, or to stagnate never kept our family from evolving into what it was always meant to be—our passion project.