Thirty some years ago today,  my husband was born.

Jake pretty much popped out of the womb with a rake in one hand and a shovel in the other.  He really, really likes to work.  Seriously, go check your closet; he just organized it.

He loves animals too.

You can tell a lot about a man by his affection for animals….and their affection for him. Animals and children flock to Jake like he’s the Pied Piper of Cracker Ville.

We’ve been married four years, and I’m still not 100 percent sure the color of his hair — is it blond? brown? dirty blond? —  he wears it so stinking short.

Thanks, military.

Jake has introduced me to so many things: chicken farming, gardening, home brewing, moonshine, shoveling, sticking my hand inside a chicken carcass.

My husband was the inspiration behind both of my books.

That’s right — Jake, the literary muse.

You’ll never meet anyone more competitive. It’s common knowledge among our friends that Jake and I can’t play on the same team because we’ll be at each other’s throats within four minutes.  He knows how to push my buttons, evidenced by the snowball aiming right for my…splat.

He’s my best friend, confidante, chore mate and goofball-in-residence.  I love him dearly.  He also eats my cooking.

Missing you, hon.  Yesterday, today and tomorrow too.  Happy birthday.

It was really hard being without Jake at his brother’s wedding this weekend, but Jake’s family went out of their way to make sure their son was included.

They had his head blown up and attached to a large popsicle stick.  Here, the Jake centerpiece.

Jake the waiter.

Jake enjoying shrimp scampi.

Jake playing the role of Alek Trebeck at the rehearsal dinner Jeopardy game. (Don’t ask.)

Jake living large inside the stretch limo.

Jake behind the wheel (his favorite place).

Jake and I share an intimate moment at the reception.

Jake pulls me in for a passionate kiss.

Hey, I’ll take what I can get.

Jake has been in Afghanistan for four months.  He’s been away from our home for five.  I’ve been making every attempt not to watch the clock until his return because I know that wishing time away is a curse, a folly, the reason why life passes by unexplored and un-lived for some, but damn, we’re not even at the half way point!

I’ve got another seven months of this?

I’m tired. I miss my husband.  He makes me laugh.  He eats my food.   I miss his cooking.  He cuddles with me at night.   I miss being a wife in practice, not just in spirit.  I’m sick of doing everything myself.  I’m sick of raising our child by myself.  I’m sick of taking care of the chickens myself!  And I’m really dreading the day this fall when the temperature dips and I have to fire up the outdoor wood furnace. (“Fire up the outdoor wood furnace.”  City people reading that phrase might think I’ve lapsed into some strange country pidjin language, but alas, I really do live in a house heated by wood.)

I miss the man most keenly after going through a box of old pictures tonight, looking for images of him to decorate my office, and stumbling upon these two taken around the time we met, in Montana in 2003.  I’m not inviting you to ogle my husband because then I might have to get all Mean Girls on you, but he’s a fine looking man, wouldn’t you say?  None finer!

Oh lord, when is this deployment going to be over?

I also stumbled upon this drawing of me, sketched a few years prior to meeting Jake.

I’m calling it “deployment face.”  (Though I suppose I wore deployment face all the time back then without realizing it. It’s just my usual angst-y expression.)

You know your life has reached the pinnacle of sophistication and glamour when the industrial sausage making people start sending you their catalogs.

The sick part?  I found myself flipping the pages, whistling, “Oh, that’s real nice. I gotta get me one of those industrial 30 pound country smokers.”

The truth is, I really miss making sausage with my husband.  And homemade wine.  And habanero beer.  And butchering chickens.  And tilling the garden.  And scraping the Hen Hut together.  Wacky country food production has come — in a strange, melancholy way — to define our “quality time” together.

We rarely go out to dinner, Jake and I. Going to the movies is a joke (it’s cause he thinks every movie ever made is just “okay”….with the exception of maybe Top Gun).  We never take long meandering walks in the woods, holding hands and talking about our feelings. No, we do things like dehydrate  50 pounds of venison, for 285 batches worth of hot, hotter and hottest (and teriyaki) jerky.  Then split a dump trailer full of logs and stack them in tall Jenga-esuqe structures in the wood shed Jake built himself.

I see I'm not the only one who thinks sausage making is "almost mystical."

Oh sure, this “quality time” is accompanied by a fair amount of whining from yours truly, but it’s met with much laughter and joking around too.

Looking at those industrial food dehydrators makes you feel drunk, right?

I’ve complained mightily to Jake about all the manual labor he makes me do, but now that he’s gone, and our wacky food efforts have been shut down or severely scaled back until his return, life has become quiet, calm and conventional.

No Christmas is complete without a commercial cabbage shredder.

I miss Jake like crazy, but at least I have Sausage Maker.

A friend and I attended a local horse show this weekend, and the highlight was watching a four year old girl astride a pony attempt to barrel race.  It was incredible. Two miniatures melded into one.  All I could think was, I want June to learn to ride.

I have an uneasy relationship with the horse, owing to the time I got bucked off one I was told was as safe and docile as could be.  Jake, who was my quasi riding instructor at the time, laughed it off (translation: he laughed at me, though he maintains to this day he only “chuckled, nervously”) and told me to get right back on and ride.

His response was to be expected — I met the man at a rodeo five minutes after he was launched from the back of a bull  – but I was so traumatized by the experience — flying through the air, landing square on my back — that I haven’t been back on a horse since.

Part of the issue is that Jake is sort of a “throw you in the deep end of the swimming pool” type of instructor; he had me trying to jump a stream the very first time we went riding together which I failed miserably at because I couldn’t see through my veil of tears.   Then he tried telling me that getting dumped is part of learning to ride, but to me, that’s like saying crashing is part of riding a motorcycle.  No thanks.

So now my fear has gotten the better of me.  I’m too afraid to ride.   I don’t get to fully embrace life in horse country as a result.  More importantly, I don’t get to  share this activity with my husband, who loves to ride.  Jake and I will never enjoy trotting through fields of clover at sunset together.

My hope now is that June will become a fine horsewoman and she can teach me how to ride.  I can only assume she’ll take a more touchy-feely approach than her old man and give her mom the TLC she requires.

He’s 7,000 miles away, working in 120 degree heat and trying to speak Dari and still found time to acknowledge our special day.  I found this waiting for me on the front porch this morning.

You can bet June and I will be slurping our favorite Oreo ice cream at the local ice cream shop today!

Today is my anniversary.  Married four year….four glorious years to a heck of a guy who has pushed me to my limits and beyond; he makes me drink tomato wine.

But Jake isn’t here and I can’t think of a clever way to pay homage to the day other than blindly send love emails to Afghanistan then blog about it.

Happily for me, my Father’s Day box showed up in Afghanistan the very day our love was made legal before family and friends four short years ago.

I had trouble coming up with a decent Father’s Day gift.  I have trouble coming up with decent gifts for Jake in general because the only thing he wants is tools and heavy equipment, which doesn’t rate high on my romance meter.

It was his first Father’s Day, therefore extra special.  But what do you send a soldier in Afghanistan?  I mean, besides clean underwear,  hand sanitizer and the latest Nickelback CD?

I opted for a simple DIY gift:  a mini photo album of June, documenting her first year of life.

Here’s June at a week old showing off her freakishly long fingers.

And here’s June’s chin, taken two weeks after I made the switch from my lackluster breast milk to high calorie formula frappe.  Mmm!

I also included, at the suggestion of my wise friend Paula, one of June’s old onesies, this one featuring a clever fabric design by Jake’s multitalented sister, Abby.

The finishing touch was a coffee mug decorated with photos of June in a front loader.  June, coffee and heavy equipment–three of Jake’s favorite things.  The perfect gift.

As I embark on a year of solo parenting, I think back on the last twelve months,  which have been the most eventful of my life.

I sold my first book, had a baby girl, sold another book, my dog died, another dog died, my cookbook publishes today (yah!), and in two short days Jake leaves our home for at least one year in Afghanistan.   It’s been a year of triumphs and tragedy, smiles and tears, good times and bad, plus two cold sores (that’s when I know I’m stressed).  And all I can do is keep putting one Ugg-clad foot in front of the other and thank my lucky stars I have a man who loves me (evidence: he lets me blog about him), a little girl who knows how to clap her hands, chickens who lay eggs and friends, family and faithful blog readers who have been looking out for us.   Thanks, everybody.  And please God, no more cold sores.

Things are about to get interesting around here.

Last night I woke up in a cold sweat.  I was having my first Canning Nightmare.  I dreamt that the jars of Candied Kumquats with Cinnamon and Star Anise I mailed this week to various editors as part of my promotional campaign for Tart and Sweet didn’t seal properly; when editors opened up my packages, they were met with a green bio-terrorism-like mold.

“I had the worst dream,” I said to Jake when he opened one eye. “I dreamt my jars of kumquats didn’t seal.”

“Sounds…..serious,” he yawned. “And this is why I will always crush you at Mindball.”

Mindball.

Jake and I got to play several rounds of this game while we were up in New York.  If you haven’t heard of Mindball, it’s a game in which players strap on headbands equipped with electrodes that measure players’ brain activity; the player with the steadiest brain waves — that is, the calmest, most relaxed state of mind — is able to push a ball by thought alone into the opponent’s goal.

I thought with all my years of yoga/kundalini training I would perform stupendously.  What a farce.  Jake crushed me every single time. The ball practically flew into my goal box every round.  Yoga can suck it.

So being just a teensy bit competitive, I made him switch sides.  I even made him try to think of the most stressful thing he could, like taxes or Afghanistan.  I had to crush him by mind control!  But no, no, his sanguine brain beat my stressed out bologna box into a pulp every time.  (Curious, considering he is the single most competitive person I know.)

“Maybe taxes and Afghanistan aren’t stressful to Jake,” my friend Anna pointed out.

“–??–”

And there you have it. What I always had a sneaking suspicion about is now confirmed by science:  My husband is a lot more chilled out than I am.  And damn, I hope those kumquats sealed.

Tonight I brought home a special bottle of Italian wine and poured myself a glass at dinner.

“Mmm,” I said taking a sip. “I like that. Try it.”

Jake tasted it. “I don’t like it,” he said. “It catches in the back of the throat. White wine should catch on the tongue.”

“Oh, really?” I asked, eying his yellow plastic mug filled with homemade hard apple cider mixed with ginger ale over ice. “And what does ‘catching on the tongue’ mean?’”

“I read it somewhere.”

“I think the real reason you don’t like it because I like it. ‘Catching on the tongue.’ Uh, yeah.”

The exchange underscored my conviction that my husband dislikes most things I like: He thinks Breaking Bad is hackneyed, couldn’t get through the first third of The Life of Pi,  he’d rather go to work than travel, and has lately taken to eating Chef Boyardee Beefaroni straight from the can.

Therein lies why I think we’re together. We have almost zero in common, which, when you think about it, gives each other a lot of room to breathe.  Jake never finishes my sentences. I never say “totally” after he makes a point.  We never feel crowded by each other, which makes marriage feel less constrained.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. Except for maybe the Chef Boyardee thing.