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Can You Give a Memory as an Anniversary Present?
I have a small framed pastel portrait hanging in my study in an unobtrusive corner. I had owned it for several years and had set it aside when I moved out of my bachelor apartment a few days before my wedding…almost exactly two years ago now.
My wife and I will be celebrating our second wedding anniversary tomorrow. I’m sitting now in my study staring into space and racking my brain trying to think of what to give my wife as an anniversary present.
The traditional second anniversary present should be made of cotton, according to my Internet source. That’s what first made me think of the portrait; it’s painted in genuine oil pastels on cotton canvas…a bit of a stretch, I’ll admit.
My wife has greatly admired the portrait for a long time, beginning back when we had just started dating in college the year before we were married. She had wanted to hang the picture in the dining room when we moved into our new home, and couldn’t understand why I had jealously kept it hidden away in my study. We had even had the first quarrel of our married life over the matter.
The drawing is charming. It shows a smiling, curly haired blond girl at that age when a girl is just on the edge of becoming a woman. She’s walking in the woods with a small dog at her feet and looking back over her shoulder and laughing. The leaves, her hair, the dog’s fur, are all blowing in a happy and carefree disarray of fall colors. It’s a candid and beautifully captured moment in time.
I know if I gave this treasured pastel portrait to my wife as an anniversary present she’d probably hang it in the room she’s now in the process of redecorating as a nursery. We’re expecting our first child in a few months. Maybe that would be a good place for it.
Or, maybe not.
What I’ve never been able to tell my wife (whom I love dearly, by the way), is that I’ll never be able to part with my pastel portrait because the girl in the picture is Amy, the girl I would have married if she had lived into full adulthood. She was my first love, and I have never been able to forget her.
I had sent an old photograph of her walking in the woods (yes, it’s me she’s smiling back at…) to an Internet site several years ago and commissioned it to be copied as a pastel drawing. I had had the framed drawing at college with me, and it has hung on a wall ever since then not far from wherever I sit to write or daydream.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop daydreaming now and go buy my wife an anniversary present. I hope the saleswoman will have some good ideas for something made of cotton (maybe a sexy cotton nightgown…?); otherwise, I’m in big trouble.
And maybe someday…perhaps as a 50th wedding anniversary present…I’ll be able to give the portrait of Amy to my wife and tell her the story behind it, too. I hope so.
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