Our anniversary was yesterday, May 2. One year ago I walked down the long pathway through the courtyard of the Mill in Greensboro, around the fountain, and up the stone steps to the trellis where Mark was waiting, smiling that tilted smile, and we said we would. And yesterday we could not believe a year had passed. It's felt like the best month of my life, not year. The fact that twelve months have passed is startling. Being married is the most fun thing I've ever been half of.
The bakery that made our wedding cupcakes, Maxie B's, made us a fresh 4-inch mini-cake pillar for our anniversary. We opted for pumpkin chocolate chip cake with cream cheese icing, which will actually change your life if you take a chance, one of the flavors of our cupcakes last year. On Saturday night Mark and I swung by the bakery in Greensboro to pick it up before spending an evening with Hannah and Josh, then heading home to Winston.
Our cake...
On the way home, as we were reading the fifth Harry Potter, I opened the gorgeous cake box to sneak a sniff of the masterpiece and my jaw hit the seatbelt. The cake had fallen over, to the left side, and was smooshed and broken against the edge of the cardboard box. The perfect cake had succumbed to the damp heat of the premature summer night and tumbled. So did my resolve. A deep frown accompanied my "OH NO" and Mark, driving, looked over and said, "Baby! What's wrong?" I had tears in my eyes.
Flashback: It's June 2, 1992. My sixth birthday. A low-budget birthday party at the park is made magical by my mother who has fashioned the most incredible, impeccable, beautiful, white, yellow and pink princess castle cake. Guys, this cake was a work of art belonging in a museum. She spent hours the day before building this cake half a foot tall with four spires made of upside-down ice cream cones, a drawbridge made of licorice and windows outlined by gumdrops. It was a real castle, my 6th year birthday cake, and I could not have been any more enraptured.
Let me reiterate that it's June. It's almost 100 degrees. The red minivan most certainly doesn't have AC. Mom says, "Ginny, wait here in the car with the cake. I'm going to go get the decorations and we'll go to the park." I'm put on guard with one responsibility: GUARD THE CAKE.
I can't quite remember the turn of events, how it all went down. But it did. Literally. Suddenly the cake was sideways on the backseat of the van. Broken spires, turned over bridge, castle walls that look like they'd been sieged. The cake fell and I.fell.apart. Can you imagine? The great crowing joy of my birthday crushed. I was hysterical.
My mom returned to the van, heard the tears, saw her eight hours of work splayed out across the plush red bench seat. She gasped, doubtless devastated at the crumbling of her masterpiece. But then she saw me and remembered how much more devastating this all was for six-year-old me, believing this to be my own palace, and in this moment she achieved her mom crown.
"Ginny, it's okay. It is better this way. Do you remember in the Narnia books when Lucy and her brothers and sister go back to Narnia and it's many many years after their first visit and they find the castle at Cair Paravel, but it is the ruins. It is long after the castle has been seiged and crumbled. But it is magical, still the castle. This castle, Gin, is the ruins."
And somehow, she convinced me.
So on Saturday, when our anniversary cake crumbled, all I could see was the Ruins from my 6th birthday. When we got home I put the cake back together, haphazardly, and smoothed the frosting over the sides. Felt like I was six. The next night, Sunday, our anniversary, I set the cake out on our breakfast table and lit candles around it. The cake was perfect, delicious, pristine.
See it? Sort of tilted and beautiful?
