anniversary – Author Sarah Angleton

Earlier this week I received a congratulatory notice from WordPress that I had been at this blogging thing for twelve years, which feels like a pretty significant milestone. As I reflected back on the winding road of ridiculousness that this space has taken over the years, I recalled that not many months into the adventure I wrote about another significant anniversary in my life when my husband and I celebrated twelve years of marriage.

Good things come in twelves. Image by Jean Christophe Baux from Pixabay

In that post, I lamented that between kids’ schedules, work schedules, and the generally tiring pace of life, we put off actually celebrating. We were in a busy time of life then, and twelve years, I suggested, didn’t really feel like a special number. Then I argued that it really should.

So, twelve years after I posted for the first time in this space, a few months before my husband and I will celebrate twenty-four years of marriage, I’m revisiting the case for year number twelve, bloggiversary style.

Because great things come in twelves, things like eggs, months, and disciples, hours on the analog clock, signs of the zodiac, tribes of Israel, drummers drumming, and years of the Practical Historian blog: your guide to practically true history. We regularly bake cookies, cupcakes, and muffins in multiples of twelve, and twelve even has its own special nickname, placing it on par with other rock star numbers like 3.14… and 6.02 x 10²³.

The word dozen comes from the French douzaine, which is a derivation of douze, the Latin word for twelve with a collective suffix tacked onto the end. Of course it’s perfectly possible to tack the same suffix onto the end of other numbers and get, for example, quinzaine (a group of fifteen) or centaine (a group of one hundred), but at least in English, we typically don’t.

Because twelve is particularly special.

Speaking mathematically (and if one feels so compelled) there’s a pretty good argument for counting in a base twelve system, rather than the base ten system in which we normally operate. We do it already when we tell time, measure in inches, or order a gross of cocktail umbrellas. In the field of finance where calendar months are often an important part of the calculation a duodecimal or dozenal system (that’s what math nerds who actually do feel compelled to argue about this kind of thing call base twelve) could make sense.

And if we think in terms of factors, which are the kind of things math nerds really geek out about, Twelve is a lot more versatile than ten. Ten factors to 2 x 5, whereas twelve factors to 6 x 2, 4 x 3, and 2 x 2 x 3.

So, thank you WordPress for the heads up, because twelve really is a thing worth celebrating:

6 posts about aliens x 2 Gravitar photo updates = 4 novel launches x 3 posts about vampires = 3 anti-censorship soapboxes x 2 summer blog breaks when my kids were young x 2 more posts about my dog than any history blog has a right to post = 12 years of spilling history and nonsense into this little corner of the blogosphere.

Here’s to another twelve years. And maybe another twelve years after that. I might even suggest that I’ll still be at this twelve times twelve years from now. But that would just be gross.

Thanks for coming along for the ride!

On a recent family excursion to Multnomah Falls, a place I’ve been too few times, I noticed a sign along the trail that I hadn’t read before, probably because I assumed it had something to do with rock formations and/or water volume as most of the signs do.

But this one was different. It described an event from September of 1995 when a boulder weighing 400 tons (according to the sign that is approximately the same weight as a school bus filled with concrete, and go ahead and disprove that) fell from the rock face next to upper Multnomah Falls, plunging 225 feet into the pool at the bottom. Upon entering the water the school bus boulder produced a 70-foot splash that washed over the observation bridge, completely dousing a wedding party that had been posing for pictures. Now, I may not care much about geology, but I am a big fan of wedding photos.

In case you haven’t been to the falls, though, let me just provide a little background. Located on Interstate 84, just outside of Portland, Multnomah Falls drops a total of 620 feet, making it the highest waterfall in the Columbia River Gorge and the second highest year-round waterfall in the United States. Between the upper and lower portion of the falls spans Benson Bridge, constructed in 1914.

And if geology is your thing, Multnomah Falls is allegedly a fascinating place to visit because rumor has it you can see something like six different lava flows, evidence of flooding that occurred thousands of years ago, and probably even some really interesting differences in rates of erosion that have led to the tiered formation of the falls and the occasional plunging school-bus-sized rock. Personally, I just care that it’s pretty.

In fact, all those impressive geological goings-on coupled with the well-placed bridge in the middle make the easily accessible Multnomah Falls an ideal spot for all your magical wedding photo needs. Then there’s the tragic and super romantic mythological accompaniment that I didn’t even mention yet.

According to one Native American legend, the chief of the Multnomah people had a beautiful and beloved daughter. He arranged for her to marry a strong young chief from the neighboring Clatsop people and planned many days of feasting and celebration during which tragedy struck. A terrible sickness descended on the wedding festivities. The only solution, as determined by an honored medicine man, was for an innocent maiden to sacrifice herself. The idea was that her sacrificial love would impress the Great Spirit and the sick would recover. When her betrothed fell ill, the young maiden took it upon herself to save her people. She climbed up to the high cliff and leapt to her death. As a token of her loving sacrifice, a spring welled up on the cliff top, the water descending as a lasting bridal gown testimony to the young maiden.

I don’t know about you, but had I gotten married in Oregon, I think we would have made the effort to get that picture. But even though the myth lends a certain wild sentimentality to the photo op, I have to wonder if it ultimately makes a lot of sense to get fancied up in tuxedoes and ball gowns and go for a hike. Assuming here that your daily wear is somewhat less formal, don’t the memories painted by such pictures just ring a little false?

Yet as anyone who has ever tried to make small talk with relative strangers for hours at a wedding reception while waiting for the bridal party to arrive knows, couples do this kind of thing all the time. In fact, my husband was a groomsman at the beginning of this summer and while I’ve not yet seen the photographic evidence, it sounds like things may have gotten a little out of hand. Let’s just say there are some modern art sculptures on an undisclosed Midwestern college campus that are probably feeling a little violated. What that has to do with the celebration of marriage, well, you’d have to ask the couple. No one else seems willing to talk about it.

So the sign at the falls got me thinking about wedding photos and it happens that a few days ago some good friends of mine celebrated their wedding anniversary. It’s one of those that I always remember not only because I was a bridesmaid (and I actually liked the dress, and yes, I have even worn it since), but also because they had the foresight to get married on International Talk like a Pirate Day.

They’re a great couple and I am honored to be featured in their wedding photos, in which I never once posed with any modern art sculptures. But as I was looking back through the pictures, I realized that along with the lined up bridal party, the first kiss as husband and wife, and the gathered family, were some of the other kinds of photos as well: the ones in which excessively well-dressed people are deliberately posed in unnaturally casual ways.

Pirate Groomsmen — Clearly these men are pirates. You can tell by the way they are standing.

Ultimately, though, I think these are the ones I like best because it says a lot about a photographer (and how well they know the couple whose wedding they are trying to capture) and even more about the couple themselves, because if the photo didn’t somehow resonate with who they are, then it never would have made the wedding album. For my friends, their memories will forever include a nod to the internationally celebrated holiday with which they share their special day. And because of their willingness to embrace it, their friends will never forget to leave a heartfelt message on their Facebook pages: “Arr. Ye be havin a jolly anniversary ye old scurvy dogs.”

I am happy to report, too, that the Multnomah Falls wedding deluge resulted in no major injuries. In an interview after the wedding, the bride said of the event, “We got the tragedy out of the way and now we’re home free.” That’s a great attitude that I assume has led to many years of happily ever after. I just hope someone managed to snap a picture of the splash.