WAYS TO SAY "I LOVE YOU"

There are lots of ways to say "I Love You."   This is one of the everyday ones---Every Day.    Chris spends an early hour on Sunday mornings, while I snuggle in for just a little more sleep, in getting together our medicines and vitamins for the week.

He gets out all the little prescription bottles, along with the great assortment of vitamin-and-supplement containers, and sets up a little assembly line on the battered old freezer---one of our very first acquisitions when we moved here twenty years ago.

We first began keeping our days' supplies, handy for setting beside our plates at breakfast and supper, in little black film cannisters---but over the years, the supply dwindled, and technology banished the small plastic cylinders to history.

Then he settled on using the same-size snap-top ones from his test-strips, and they worked just fine.   And THEN---one day at a Flea Market (or Gun Show---probably that, as improbable as kitchenware at such a meeting might seem) he found these cute little Tupperwares, bright and tight and easy to find.   And that last attribute is right up there in their glories, for we misplace one every couple of days, and orange IS easier to spot than gray, when you're scrambling under a chair or in a dark corner, which is where they inevitably escape to, or we've set them down amongst books and bags, where they blend in like ET in the toy-closet.

He sets out all the big bottles and jars, counting out and dropping in all the "real" meds first, so as to keep proper count and be able to see that they're all there.    Then a big handful of each vitamin, one in each gaping little mouth, til all the containers are filled.   The pink marker-circles on the numbered lids are mine, for all my day's worth fit into one, and his have a pale green mark, for both morning and night.

We HAVE graduated from those huge old horsepills on top to the tiny red jewels of Krill Oil, which fill your mouth with the lightest essence of vanilla as they go down.

And if this is too much boring information for one day---it's just one of the ways he richer and poorers, in sickness and in healths.   The tiny orange box at my place at the table says "I love you," as loudly and clearly as a dozen roses, every day.