Stuff and Things and Whatnot

In the weeks before our first anniversary, Mike and I had a little chat about what we wanted to do for gifts. We agreed we didn’t want to get into a present-oneupsmanship game that could spiral quickly out of control and decided that we would buy ourselves a joint gift each year, but I was a little stuck on what that joint gift should be. The vision I had was of a new vacuum cleaner, and I really didn’t want us to fall into the habit of giving ourselves something so mundane and unsentimental.

Then Mike had the idea: art. We would buy a piece of art for each anniversary. We would live with these pieces in our home and see them every day and remember where we bought them and which year of our marriage they commemorate. Buying art together also required us to acknowledge and honor each other’s aesthetic taste by looking for pieces we both loved.

Here’s our third anniversary art:

We bought it at A.T. Hun Gallery in Savannah, Georgia during our fall vacation. We saw several pieces there that we were interested in, and although we each liked this one at first, we bypassed it and continued to look around. Each of us kept coming back to it — it has surprising depth and a subtle sense of motion — and we finally realized that it was the piece.