my grandmother had been hanging onto the "family piano" for years - waiting for us to get our own house, so she could give it to me... and i had been waiting just as long to have a home in which to put that piano...
so when we bought our house, i was ready. i knew what wall it would go on. i knew how it would look. i even lobbied for red on the walls in our living room, because i knew the piano would look awesome against it.
one day, in may or june, i asked matt about the piano... his answer was "i'm just not ready yet". this made me crazy. what's to be ready for? what does "ready" look like? how can i make you ready!? the conversation escalated into a major problem. finally i had to relent - if he's not ready, he's not ready... but it hurt. i couldn't help feeling a little like "if he loved me, he wouldn't withhold something that would make me so happy".
flash forward to our anniversary. matt has been toying with the idea of going camping the friday/saturday of the weekend, and we planned to celebrate sunday. as we near the date, he's no closer to planning a camping trip, but finally decides on a long day of fishing. we've even decided that though we'll have a nice dinner sunday night, we'll exchange our gifts saturday night.
i've filled up my day with activity... yoga in the morning, breakfast and shopping with the girls, blackberry picking with lani. everything goes as planned. as lani and i head to the blackberries, we pass our street and i happen to glance down, noticing a white car - matt's? - in front of our house. lani manages to persuade me nonchalantly that it was a neighbor's car... after all, matt has just texted me and told me he "caught a big one".
lani and michael are texting back and forth alot. i don't think anything of it. finally, the boys decide they're hungry - when will we come home? we finish up picking blackberries - covered in juice, stains, brush and having been picked and torn at by thorns - and head home.
as i open, i notice right away that michael is off to the side, holding my camera, pointing it at me. i give him a funny look - is he taking pictures of all these awesome blackberries we picked!?
i walk into the house, still thinking it's very weird that he's taking pictures of us - and then i really see it. my piano. i burst into tears, absolutely stunned. i hug matt, i get details about how it all went down - but most of all, i'm struck by the fact that "i'm not ready" really meant "it's not our anniversary yet". he'd been planning this for months.
best gift ever. every time i see it, i feel loved all over again. i love that man.
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