The Year of Maps

I faced a major disappointment on my honeymoon. You see, I fully expected to be snowed-in during our January week in Boston, a "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging from our door knob. As "luck" would have it, Boston experienced a freak streak of weather, and we have seven full days of 70-degree weather. So, maps and guides in hand, we spent every breakfast of our honeymoon plotting the day's activities. Life-changing french toast on our plates, we discussed walking routes and strategized eating spots. We had a honeymoon full of street corners and coffee stops and museums and local eateries and walking until our feet gave out.

(By the way, Mike also faced a major disappointment that week as he watched my suitcase vomit up more and more piles onto the floor as the week progressed. But it was too late--we were already married. Sucker!)

For our anniversaries, I make a slideshow of the year's pictures, including a soundtrack of the songs that got us through those scenes. The year was full of snowfalls on castle walls, crooked apartment ceilings, cobblestone streets with foreign signs, and lots of hours in the car. We visited 12 countries, spent nights in just as many states, and had mail delivered to five different locations. (Six, if you count the fraudulent Netflix account we started at Brittany's house in July.) We drove from Philadelphia to Omaha to Minneapolis to Grand Rapids to Philadelphia and back. We argued over countless bus routes and ran for our lives to catch more than a few trains, jumping aboard and praying to God we'd translated the departure sign correctly.

One of our favorite songs is Josh Ritter's "The Temptation of Adam." It's a song about a boy and a girl falling in love inside a missile silo during WWIII, and it's phenomenal.

If you would stay, we could stick pins in the map for all the places where we thought that love would be found. But I would only need one pin to show where my love's at.

(Of course, he goes on to say that the pin would go on a top secret location 300 feet under the ground.)

Last year, I printed out the sky's view of our little Hollow Run apartment. The image on the paper was just hard-lined greens and greys from the sky. I stuck the map on our door and stuck a bright green pin through the paper and pressed it hard into the wood. In that pinprick, if you looked carefully enough, you'd find the tupperware I melted onto our stovetop, the bookshelves, the Darth Vader cut-out that our hamster worshipped every morning, the dirty coffee mugs, the couch where I kissed Mike like I never had after he read aloud our first wedding card: "Mr and Mrs Michael Colletto."

When I came home from Romania to our Bratislava apartment, there was a little map of 10 Slowackeho waiting for me.

In August, we unpacked a U-Haul (up steps and through three doors) into another apartment all by ourselves--without breakfast--and I strongly considered how good it would feel to punch my husband in the face. Soon, we were binging on a large Hawaiian pizza in the middle of our hardwood floors. Surrounded by boxes full of possessions we didn't remember, we brainstormed what it might feel like to be settled for awhile. We weren't even fighting over the last piece before we realized we just weren't ready for all that settling nonsense. Not when God has so much left for us to do.

Home. It's a relative term that simply revolves around Mike. I hope we print out countless maps that find themselves stuck to doors all over the world, doors of all different colors with new memories waiting behind them. I'll need more than one pin, to be sure.

Would you hold me here forever like you're holding me tonight?