Plane tickets present a definitive endpoint for talking; the mental equivalent of a sign over your friend's head announcing how many hours remain before it's time to pack up yet again and fly back into your regularly scheduled lives.

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.

Already?

Website as excavation project: 2000, 2001. Skip ahead a bit, and here we are again, well past the no-longer-newlywed stage and into the haze of The Early Years. Five years, come and gone, and right now, we are gone, holed up and quiet, in a bed not our own in a weekend that wholly is.

When I was in Arkansas this past weekend, my grandmother was surprised when I told her that it was our anniversary this week. "Five years already?"

"In the grand scheme of things, it's not many."

I make no secret that domesticat.net isn't an open book, despite the regularity and honesty of my words here. Certain subjects are off-limits by choice; my friends may learn many things about me by what I publish here, but the overwhelming majority of my relationship with my spouse remains a subject not for public consumption.

All these years later and I realize that I would have been desperately unhappy if I had chosen to share my life with someone who was not also under the thrall of the written word. Eventually, the pull of words would have won, requiring me to set up some portion of the house that was devoted to stillness, no matter how little the other inhabitants of the house understood.

Tsk. Can't be having this, folks. Those silly referer logs; they tell me when you're linking to my site. Next thing you know I'll be thinking that the referers mean that someone's actually reading this site, and if I thought that, then I'd feel infinitely more guilty about not posting many updates.

Oh, wait. I already feel guilty.So, yes. I'll tell you a story, see, and you'll all (all three of you!) feel better, having gotten your fix for the day.

Close the door. No need to be quiet; for now, there is no one else here.

The lock on the door slides home with a satisfyingly solid click. Two sets of whiskers slide cautiously into view from behind the divider; they are followed moments later by four cautious, reddish-golden feline eyes.