In about seven hours--at the time I'm writing this--I will have been with Juliette for half of my life. When we started dating, I was seventeen, a senior in high school. Now I'm thirty-four, and we have a mortgage, a dog, two kids, and a third on the way. She has seen every step of my adult life, and then some--and I hers. Seventeen years ago, we couldn't have known what we were getting into, where we'd be a whole lifetime hence, and now here we are, and what a life it is. I'm thankful every day to have gotten to share my life with her, and to get to keep on doing so.

Is it getting to be too much, this whole dark photo thing I seem to be doing? You'd tell me if it were, wouldn't you?

It's funny how quickly I slip into lonely melancholy when left to myself. Or, I suppose, it must be funny to other people looking in. Or, no, it is funny to me, to part of me. It's been less than two days since I've seen them, and less than two days until I see them again. But when I come to bed and don't find the television on, illuminating a scene like this, I can't help but reflect on how big and cold that bed is for just one person.

I am, as must be obvious, quite melodramatic.

I always want to take more pictures of Juliette. She is, after all, the most important person in my life. I worry, though, that she will not like the way the pictures look. Sometimes I don't take the picture because of that, but maybe I should instead take it as an opportunity to take better pictures. She liked this one. So do I.

It's been more than half a year since I last posted a photo, and I'm not sure this will ever be a daily feature again. But, for now, here are some photos from our trip to a pumpkin patch last night.

Her hair, sun-kissed--sometimes me-kissed--brown and blonde, with glints of gold in the setting sun. When I lean in to kiss the top of her head, she smells nice--or is it that nice smells like her? She frets about graying now and then, but to my eyes she's perfect, more so today than at sixteen, when we were young together. Some day we'll be old together, but together still, and when the sun sets from time to time it'll kiss her hair again, and so will I.

Children acting like adults is cute and another huge photographic cliche. What strikes me about this picture is not the phone--well, not just the phone--but her gesture and expression and body language. She fits right in with her mom and aunt.

The question is, which one is being impatient here?

It slipped my mind, somehow, that Juliette has taken up knitting recently. I wonder what she's been working on while she's been away.

On Sunday we hauled the kiddie pool out of the garage for the first time this summer. It was also Eva's first time in there, so of course we both felt the need to document the occasion. Eva, of course, loved it, even though she wasn't such a fan of having sunscreen in her hair.