Always in the distance was an indigo sky

An Etruscan sphinx was waiting for us at the top of the stairs, when we decided to start at the top of the Harvard Art Museums and work our way down. We had an hour and a half and we just made it to John Singleton Copley's portrait of John Adams (1783), which Abigail liked and John dismissed as "a Piece of Vanity"; on our way out, we took a lingering minute for Burne-Jones' "The Depths of the Sea" (1887). derspatchel finds her smile catlike, straight out at the viewer: mine, mine, mine. It's all right, I told him: I know you can breathe under water. In between we were lucky enough to arrive at the Rothko murals right as they turned off the projections, so that we could see all the warm tones wash right out of the canvas into charcoal blues and ashen plums and chalky pinks rather than somber, smoldering reds and volcanic mauves, shadow-black columns on pink granite ground—no one knew in 1961 how badly Lithol Red was not colorfast. I admit my favorite panel in the exhibition was a full-size study in bars of deep, flaming pomegranate, Pompeiian red, but if it had gone on the walls of the Holyoke Center in '64, it would have been a wraith by '79. I'm just as happy it didn't make the cut. Next door was a small traveling exhibit of prints and photographs from various World's Fairs. Otherwise we roamed through the classical galleries of the third floor, Egyptian bronze falcons and lion-headed deities, Neo-Assyrian reliefs and a terra-cotta lion of Ištar from Nuzi, a fragment of Byzantine tapestry, lots and lots and lots of Greek pottery and coins. Arsinoë II from a temple wall. An Etruscan bronze mirror that looks like celadon with two thousand years of patina. The sphinx.

A year ago, we had much more elaborate anniversary plans, but our current circumstances do not permit travel: so we decided on one museum we had never been to and one restaurant. The renovated Harvard museums fulfilled the first criterion. Dinner was at Bergamot and it was splendid. Braised rabbit risotto and house-made charcuterie, including a cool, savory chicken liver paté over blackcurrants. Rob had short rib with slices of mushroom and slender potatoes and I had monkfish over celeriac and caramelized cauliflower florets. We went overboard on the side dishes, but they served us well as snacks the next day. Our desserts came with "Happy Anniversary" written in chocolate around the rim of the plate. (Mine was the Citrus Pavlova, the night's experimental dessert with hibiscus meringue, lime mousse, lemon-and-poppy-seed sorbet, and a kind of pistachio crumble. Rob had a Blackout Cake, which I admired from a safe distance because of the coffee caramel.) On our way out, the manager apologized for not knowing it was our first anniversary—he'd have offered us champagne. We were overwhelmed.

And then we walked home, one of the longer ways round, because there was a long night walk in March 2012 when we looked for the planetary conjunction, and my parents met us at the house with an anniversary gift (a card and DVDs of the video taken at our wedding, painstakingly presented by my father in several different formats, including the raw files), and we watched bits of sketch comedy off YouTube (The Two Ronnies, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, SNL's amazing mock-trailer for The Sinister Coterie of Midnight Intruders), and then we both had headaches from the shifting weather pressures and went to bed. And despite those last fifteen words, it was a good day. It was a good anniversary. There were cats waiting for us when we came home.