Love is....

Saturday evening Gregg and I went out for a romantic early dinner at Cesar's, which I had been dying to go to since it opened. We drank wine, ate fine cheese, birds came down and tied ribbons in our hair as a jellybean rainbow magically appeared above us. It was all meant to be a celebration of Madelena and a precursor to a Grown Up Night Alone with No Children In The County. The sheets were clean, the bed was made, and the candles were at the ready.

Three hours later I was not in the throes of passion but throwing down my dinner, lunch and possibly parts of my small intestine. I was hit with the most vicious case of food poisoning I have ever experienced, and little did I know that while we DID have plans for something that would last alllll niiiight loooooong, fate would intervene with a little something else that would last even longer. And while it would tone my abs and slim me down, it was not exactly how I planned to spend my last 36 hours alone with my husband before departing for Guatemala.

G, he of queasy stomach and gagging at the sight of wet toast in the sink, was a trooper. He fetched crackers and ginger ale at dawn, barely flinched when they were rejected in all ways, talked to answering services and doctors and triage nurses and barely intelligible pharmacists. He drove 90 miles to pick up Demando, and kept him from my bed when all SJ really wanted to do was bounce on my stomach. He slept on the dog couch to avoid shaking the bed and increasing my nausea, and pretended not to notice when the clean sheets became less than spotless and vanilla-scented. He put the trash can by my bed, and as I attempted to change venues, carried it up to the sofa and back down again as I realized that my only safe haven was to be our bed. He brought me ice chips on demand, popsicles that were red-not-orange-oh-please-not-the-orange-make-it-blue-but-not-orange-even-if-you-have-to-open-every-white-wrapper and made chicken noodle soup merely to be rejected over and over again.

After three days of hell, I realized that sometimes love is not all candlelight and roses and jellybean rainbows. Sometimes, just sometimes, love is a trash can beside the bed and a man on your dog sofa.