The Covid Anniversary

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I think the first wedding anniversary is supposed to be paper. And I know the 25th is the silver anniversary and the 50th is the golden one.
I'm not sure what the 44th anniversary is, but for my mate and me, married on February 19, 1977,

...number 44 will go down as the COVID anniversary.

For Tom and me - and I expect for many others for all the special occasions that came along during the course of this past year - what really distinguished this anniversary was the quandary of trying to figure out what to do celebrate it while Dr. Fauci was still telling us to stay home.

To be honest, most of our wedding anniversaries over the past 44 years came and went without any particular festivity on our part.
For our first anniversary we invited some friends to a party at Tom's brother's house in Cincinnati. (We lived at that time in Louisville, Kentucky while Tom worked on his Masters at the University of Louisville.

We moved the party to Cincinnati because we figured Louisville was too far a destination to ask our friends to travel to).
For our second anniversary, by which time we had moved to Columbus, Ohio, we went out for lunch, but by then I was already pregnant and, as I recall, way too nauseated to enjoy the food.
From then on we spent our wedding anniversaries doing basically the same things that we did all the other days of year, comfortably settled in as we were in our day-to-day routine of work and family, sometimes philosophizing that the most authentic celebration of a wedding anniversary lay in simply living the married life. I, for one, was fine with that. Or maybe always just too busy and tired to feel like doing anything else.

Then, a few years ago - well, it was in 2015, in fact - I found a Groupon for the Berlin Resort in Berlin, Ohio, in the heart of Ohio Amish Country.
From the photo in the Groupon ad the place looked nice,

...and advertised a good-looking pool, killer-looking work-out facility, and - here was the
clincher - a movie theater right in the hotel.

I found myself harboring a hankering for a get-away at this place, and since our anniversary was coming up - our 38th - we decided to to use this as an excuse - or rather, a reason - to stay at the Berlin Resort. Which we did. (See post from 2/23/2015, "Return To Amish County, Part 1").
Such a pleasant - if somewhat subdued - time did we have that from then on a two-night trip to the Berlin Resort became our go-to anniversary destination celebration.
Sometimes as our anniversary approached we would ponder whether we should go someplace else or do something else; after all there wasn't terribly much to do in Berlin, Ohio, where there was no alcohol, the town closed at five pm and the restaurants at eight, and the principle diversion was strolling up and down the main drag perusing the Amish arts-and-crafts stores (See post from 2/26/2016, "Clean, Sober - And Slightly Bored - In Amish Country").

But then every time, after tossing around a few interesting anniversary trip options, we'd always end up admitting that all we really felt like doing was spending a couple of days in Amish Country. And so we always did.

(Except for one year - 2017 - when I didn't snag a reservation in time and the Berlin Resort was all booked up and so we made do with a weekend of staying in town and checking out the local attractions, of which there are considerable in Columbus).

Which brings us to this year. For us, being one year into the COVID epidemic and still observing the quarantine, going to the Berlin Resort for our anniversary was, of course, out of the question. In fact, doing anything at all outside of our four walls was out of the question.
But What could we do at home to specialize our anniversary? Well, I finally decided, we could always eat.
So on the morning of our anniversary, instead of indulging in our usual breakfast of oatmeal (for Tom) and toast (for me), I fixed us the meal known in our family as the Big Breakfast that is usually reserved for Christmas and other rare special occasions,

...followed by a breakfast dessert of cinnamon cream cheese bread pudding.

That afternoon I made a cake, which I had originally intended to decorate, but then just decided to go overboard with on the icing,

...and layer with more icing and strawberry filling. As I lack the artistic pastry touch the cake came out, alas, as rather an ugly duckling presentation-wise, but it was trés delish all the same.

Tom, meanwhile, bought me some flowers,

...cheerfully washed dishes,

...and otherwise went on about his day,

...and I went on about mine, which included teaching my now-online piano students.

For dinner we had seafood pasta,

...and ugly but yummy cake.

After dinner we watched a movie, a thriller called "I Care A Lot,"

...in which Rosamund Pike plays an insidious villain with a terrifying haircut.

And so went our 44th anniversary, the COVID Anniversary. And now, on to another year of continuing to, as Cole Porter put it:
"Settle down as man and wife,
to solve the riddle called married life."

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