Last Sunday marked the third anniversary in this house, the longest I’ve ever been in a single house.

This weekend marks, not our 12th wedding anniversary, because that was in March, but the 12th anniversary of flying home to California (when it was home) for the pot-luck reception my parents hosted. We had a Humanist minister lead a brief ceremony, where we quoted from Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, and read the “Apache Wedding Prayer,” and my grandmother gave us her mother’s wedding ring, a rose-gold band with sheaves of wheat flanking a platinum inset holding three diamond chips. I’m wearing it as I write this, with her diamond engagement ring. I bought Fuzzy’s ring, and keep joking that someday I’d like a ring from him, but the reality is that I like being able to wear my family history on my fingers, and my great-grandmother was such a tiny woman (or so I’ve heard – she died when my grandmother was nineteen) that the small scale of her ring suits my pixie hands.

Neither our actual wedding (we eloped) nor this ceremony were terribly fancy, there were no strings of bridesmaids, groomsmen gift buying frenzies, or hoards of relatives we barely knew. Instead, a few simple words, and then a pot-luck in the back yard where our multicultural friends brought traditional wedding foods from their own families or countries of origin.

Part of me wishes we’d done a formal wedding.
Part of me doesn’t.

But either way, October has become a month of personal milestones.

And I rather like that.