I was supposed to be asleep. Every now and then, for some reason, even with the best of modern pharmaceuticals, my body just gets determined to stay awake. Therefore, it's well past three in the morning and here I am, glorying in the quietness of my new keyboard in the partially-cleaned computer room.See, I'm plotting. That never bodes well.

I always get kinda thinky on this day. Don't mind me; it'll pass. It was just a day picked by my mother's obstetrician, but somewhere along the way, along the years, it became 'my' day.(Hey, I was breech, and my mother was tiny. They took no chances…and you in the back, the one that just piped up and said "Even from birth you were determined to show your ass!" -- I heard that, you little prankster. No cookies for you!)

You are cleaning right now, sorting clothes into 'keep' and 'donate' piles, with the end hope of having a usable closet again. I am in the computer room, new music playing, cooling down from my second workout of the day and trying to give you the room you need to finish your task in the space of a day.

A day, this day, your thirtieth birthday.

On the day I married you, I stood there, twenty-one, wondering what in the world we'd manage to do with our lives if we walked in the same direction.

It's been so long since the discovery of the synchronicity of our birthdays that the magic of it is a little lost on us now: yours the sixteenth, your sister Lori's the eighteenth, mine the twentieth. Instead, over the years, October has just become 'our month'; a birthday week shared by us and, later, unwittingly, by two cats who were born five years ago, sometime between your birthday and mine.

Since you didn't ask, a few explanations, on this, a birthday. Heavy on the cryptic, but if someone ever said that we were supposed to be self-explanatory on our birthdays, he was shot before his message reached me.

One for each year:

(whap) "Tenzing, get OFF the fabric!"
MEOW! (indignant)
(sound of cat being tossed across the room)
(sound of cat jumping onto fabric)
"Edmund!"
(sound of cat being tossed across the room)
(sound of cat jumping onto fabric)
"TENZING!"
(sound of cat being tossed across the room)
(sound of spouse laughing) "Got help, hmm?"

...and so it goes, and so it goes.

After eight years, you get a little blasé about sharing birthday time with your spouse. Our birthdays aren't on the same day, exactly; just four days apart, but in a sequence that amused both our families to no end when they first realized a sequence existed. First Jeff's, then two days later his sister Lori's, and then two days later my birthday rounds out the series.

Sequence. Order. All slapping into place with a neat little snick, the sound of a previously-undiscovered hole in your life filling up.

For him: a book of linux server hacks. For me, a pair of sharpenable sewing scissors. Little things. For better or for worse, we're not the kind of people to make large productions out of birthdays.