for the love of sausage fingers

a year or so ago my wedding rings stopped fitting.  i forced them onto my sausage fingers many times and then put them in a jewelry box and adopted a larger, much less meaningful substitution.  several people asked why i just didn’t have them resized.  i maintained the problem was not the rings but my steady change in weight over the years.  i was not the girl he married eleven years ago, and i truly believed (for a minute or so) that he would rather have that girl back.  i had the lingering doubt that i was not worthy of my rings if i wasn’t the person he married.  not just my sausage fingers, but everything seemed so much bigger and dramatic and more complicated than it did eleven years ago.  weight and gravity hold a person down, hold a person back from moving forward, keep them restrained just enough that they miss the light on the horizon.

we are somewhere between idaho and colorado amidst a frozen, windy wasteland.  the beautiful sunlight is shining on my laptop screen and i can see those rings in the reflection.  the weight of my fingers has not changed much since i became determined that changing my hands was the way to a  dream marriage.  the rings were put away too long.  without them i forgot the way he looked at me when he put them on.  the rings themselves were not important, but without them on my finger it became just a bit too easy to forget all of the love behind them.  so much time passed, i tried to jam them on my finger to no avail.  there is no fitting that eleven year ago sized marriage onto the people we have become.  resizing became the only option.  letting go of the past.  letting go of unrealistic expectations.  that was my gift this Christmas.  rings that fit perfectly.  now.  on sausage fingers.  with all of the love behind them.  looking at the reflection of those rings i see they no longer remind me of the wife i think he would want.  they show how love grows and changes with time.  just like our bodies, our families, our minds…and our marriage.