cake.

Next week I am going to make my own wedding cake. No, I've never made a wedding cake before. Yes, I am already married.

On October 2, I'll be celebrating two years of marriage with my wonderful husband. We had the best wedding either of us has ever been to (that's the point, right?), and of course that included a delicious cake. Admittedly, we let our moms pick the flavors, as we let them decide on everything except flowers (I insisted on sunflowers) and music (we picked our own live band). Neither of us wanted a cake that was too fancy or fussy, so we asked the decorator to simply pipe on the design from our invitations, a simple orange outline of leaves on a vine, topped with two birds in wedding clothes. It was perfect. Per the custom, they sent us away with the top of the cake to freeze and eat on our first wedding anniversary.

But not per the custom, we couldn't take the cake with us, as we were leaving the next day on a one-way flight to Nashville, where we would live for the next year. We were on the move, and we couldn't cram a piece of cake into our bags, no matter how much I love the tradition. So we ate what we could, and left the rest in our hotel room. And then we were on our way.

On our one year anniversary, typically the day couples share the leftover cake, by then probably covered in tiny ice crystals, we couldn't sit together on the couch and reminisce about the wedding and pretend that the cake tasted delicious after being in the freezer for a year. It was a special day, that first anniversary. But we were apart, once again on the move.

We had decided to move back to Boston, and Kevin had gone ahead of me to start his job. There was no romantic dinner, no flipping through the wedding album, no cake to defrost. Instead, he sent me sunflowers, and we talked on the phone, and my older sister flew to Nashville to spend the weekend with me (yes, she is a fabulous sister).

For most people, the second anniversary might not seem as special as the first, or maybe the 5th, or any of the significant anniversaries that come later. But for us, I know this one will always be unique. It will always be the first October 2 that we weren't on the move. That we weren't boarding a plane or packing a suitcase or saying goodbye to anyone or anything or any place. This year we simply celebrate, not only each other but the fact that two years later we are still creating something new. Still changing, still growing, still thinking, "How did we get so lucky?"

And that feels like it deserves a cake of its own. Not the cake we ate when we had no idea what was ahead of us, the cake of our first hours of marriage where everything was easy and blissful and planned for us. This cake will be made in our kitchen, where we created our food blog, sliced in the dining room that we recently painted, and likely eaten in the living room where we keep our wedding album. I think that's when we'll look back through the pages, remembering how my dress zipper broke and I lost a diamond from my ring, how Kevin's grandmother nearly fell over from dancing too much, how my little sister's maid of honor speech made me cry. We'll remember the boxes we've packed, the three different addresses we've already had, the 1,100 mile trip to Nashville that we've driven so many times, the way the cats always cried from the back seat while the scenery changed around us. We'll remember the honeymoon we finally took this summer, the way we felt leaving our wedding in a sea of sparklers, the cake we shared in a hotel on the beach that first night as husband and wife.

We'll remember everything. And then we'll eat a fresh piece of cake and toast to whatever comes next.