and two days. That’s how long we’ve been married.
On Friday, Kelsey called me at work while she was out shopping. She wanted to know if she should get the pork spare ribs for our barbecue on Saturday. For our anniversary BBQ!
That’s right. My wife is so cool that she thinks it’s a great idea to have a BBQ to celebrate the first anniversary of our wedding. Of course, she was pretty cool to be willing to have a BBQ for our wedding reception as well.
I made sure all the guys at work knew how cool my wife is. And I told her to get 4 packs of ribs.
So we returned to the scene, Luther Burbank Park on Mercer Island, one year later (minus two days), invited a bunch of friends, and proceeded to barbecue. This time Kelsey let me man the grill. For our wedding, her stepdad, Todd did the honors.
We had enough food for 40, and it took many trips to the car and back to haul it all. Finally, around 1:30, I started the coals. At 2 o’clock the first guests showed up right as I was putting the first rack of ribs on. They thought it started at 1. Only a trickle of guests were there by 3, so I sat down to enjoy the ribs (not my best, but easily in the top 10) and Kelsey’s famous pasta salad and brownies (not mixed) and chips and pop and cherries and grapes and some banana bread Suegra brought.
Before long, there were a ton of people, and I was putting more chicken and ribs on. The coals were dying down and running out, so I gathered up some sticks with Eden’s help, and got the fire going. This batch was even better than the last.
There was no dunk tank, but I had to go wash my hands in the lake, and ended up getting a little bit wet.
I’ve been eating leftover BBQ chicken for lunch at work this week, and I was a little sad to learn this morning that Kelsey ate the last of the ribs. But I still love her, and we’ll give another year a shot.