Champagne

My husband surprised me with dinner last night at a nice restaurant in the Big City. Feeling the urge to splurge, I ordered champagne with dessert. When casting about for something to toast, I realized that the last time I had bubbles was on my last night in the Small Town, when I shared the last bottle of our wedding champagne with the crowd of regulars at our favorite bar. I poured little glasses for the dozen or so people who had become our friends, and singled out all their fondest wishes, lofty aspirations, and crazy pipe dreams in my toast. I even got a little misty.

We bought a couple cases of cheap but good champagne for our wedding. We drank most of it on the big day, between the little reception after the ceremony and the big party after the reception. We packed a couple bottles for our honeymoon. We poured a bottle at the brunch we threw for the middle kid's high school graduation. We gave a bottle to the eldest kid to take on his honeymoon (apparently, it worked -- they got pregnant by accident and now I'm a grandmother!). We drank a couple bottles at my husband's birthday party last fall. We might have even had a bottle on our anniversary to wash down the stale cake that my best friend thought to wrap up and stow away for us.

Perhaps it would have been better if I'd saved that last bottle to celebrate our first night in our new house, but it seemed more fitting that I finish it off on my way out of the Small Town. I mean, I wouldn't have lived there in the first place, if not for the wedding that caused me to buy the champagne.... Circular logic, I know, but it made sense at the time. So to bring it full circle last night -- at least in my mind -- we drank a little toast to our memories of the Small Town.


The Wife Who Knows