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#01 – Comfort
When the doorbell rings, he tries to get up to see who’s there; she swats at him sleepily and says that whoever it is can come back later, she’s comfortable.
#02 – Kiss
The first kiss he gave her wasn’t really a kiss at all, but the single silver-wrapped chocolate was as good an expression of his intentions as any real kiss.
#03 – Soft
Considering how much time she spends gardening, he finds it astonishing that her hands are as soft as they are.
#04 – Pain
The first time her ankle gives out underneath her when she lands on it funny, she collapses to the ground with a cry that has him running to her with his heart in his throat.
#05 – Potatoes
He’s never told her how sweet he thinks it is that every year she saves a potato from the spring crop all the way until fall just to throw it in the harvest festival stewpot—to bring the spring back again, she says, but partly because she knows that he likes potatoes.
#06 – Rain
The first time she showed up outside the forge, soaked to the bone and looking like a drowned kitten, he rushed about desperately trying to get her warm and dry—now, he still goes through the same motions, but without the urgency; she’ll be fine, and maybe next time she’ll remember to bring an umbrella!
#07 – Chocolate
No matter how embarrassing he thinks it is, she still has that first hershey’s kiss carefully put away somewhere, and she vows that she’ll never eat it—it’s too special.
#08 – Happiness
The fact that she conspired with his grandfather to throw him a surprise birthday party (and that they succeeded!) leaves him feeling rather disgruntled, but that in no way subtracts from his happiness, especially not when he sees the sparkling joy in her eyes.
#09 – Telephone
He will never stop complaining about the fact that his getting her a cellphone was useless if it spent its whole life just sitting next to the landline in the house; she tells him that he knew what he was in for when he married her, and wasn’t her absentmindedness part of the bargain?
#10 – Ears
Sometimes Gray wonders how she can manage like that, running about with her hair down and in the way all the time, but when he asks her about it she just looks at him in bemusement and says that’s what she has ears for.
#11 – Name
For the first week and a half of her life, their infant daughter is just “the baby’; after that, they finally agree to name her Adelaide, because she is their little princess, and with her gold hair and blue eyes she certainly looks the part.
#12 – Sensual
There are few things more sensual than the feel of his hand on the small of her back, quietly claiming her and warning off all other comers, like he thinks that she is something worthy of protection.
#13 – Death
Trying to explain the concept of death to a three-year-old—admittedly, in the context of Why We Have To Water Our Plants—is much harder than either of them expected, and Gray finds himself reassuring his teary-eyed daughter that yes, of course her potted plant went to heaven, while his wife stifles giggles in the doorway.
#14 – Sex
Equally difficult was trying to explain to said three-year-old what those two sheep were doing, later that year.
#15 – Touch
Gray never understood his wife’s need to touch everything and glee over it, but the first time he caught his daughter poking her jell-o and then giggling madly about it, he resigned himself to explaining very, very slowly why all items in the forge were off-limits—maybe her could get her mother to show the white burn scar she had on the tip of her index finger from the time SHE had tried poking things…
#16 – Weakness
No matter how strong he got, even the powerful blacksmith went weak with laughter when he was tickled just right,
#17 – Tears
He always knew where to find her when she was crying—a single, great weeping willow by the river, one that had hidden so many generations of children’s tears.
#18 – Speed
When she rode her horse around the farm at full gallop, whooping in sheer joy at her hair flying out behind her and the exhilaration of speed, he sometimes wondered how he had managed to tame such a creature, one who would run for the sheer joy of running, and how he kept her with him.
#19 – Wind
And when she ran full tilt up to the peak of mother’s hill and stood there, the wind catching her hair and skirt and setting them flying, she looked like a sylph about to fly up into the air, but that was okay because she always turned and reached out a hand back to him, as if to say “come with me!”.
#20 – Freedom
And she once confided in him that sometimes, standing there, she felt like she could just soar upward and be free as a bird—and then laughingly reminded him that she was the kind of bird that mated for life, so even if she did sprout wings he’d still be stuck with her.
#21 – Life
He had never experienced anything more magical than holding his infant daughter in his arms just moments after her birth, even if she was red and wrinkly and screaming her head off.
#22 – Jealousy
He never told her that the reason for that hand on the small of her back wasn’t jealousy, exactly, but more that he couldn’t really believe that such an amazing person could really belong here, and sometimes he worried that someday the elves would take her, or something.
#23 – Hands
She could never hold her hands still when she talked—they had tested it, and she actually could not talk with her hands immobile, but that might have had more to do with the fact that he had immobilized her hands by holding them in his own, and his hands were distracting!
#24 – Taste
He loved the fact that every autumn and well into winter every year she tasted like hot mulled cider, rich and warm and home-like.
#25 – Devotion
Saibara thought, with some amusement, that devotion was probably the right word for what his grandson was doing, following that farmer-girl around like a lovesick puppy.
#26 – Forever
She always complains that it takes forever for the crops to sprout, and is exultant when they do—and he always takes great pleasure in teasing her about so, forever’s been and gone again, then?
#27 – Blood
He knew their daughter was far too clever for her own good the day she came back from the library and asked, all innocent, why doesn’t horseshoe crab blood absorb oxygen? It stays blue even when exposed to air!
#28 – Sickness
There was absolutely nothing as pathetic as seeing his wife and four-year-old daughter sick and miserable in bed and both giving him puppy-dog eyes, asking for soup.
#29 – Melody
One week before Adella was born, she mentioned that it would be nice to be able to play the same lullabies for her daughter that her mother used on her, which prompted a hectic week of searching on his part until he finally tracked down the CD in question.
#30 – Star
The first thing he made her was a flower-shaped brooch when they were courting; the next was her engagement ring, with a perfect sparkling star on it, because she had once commented that she “didn’t know why all those ladies in stories ask their lovers to fetch them the moon to show their devotion—stars are so much prettier!”
#31 – Home
He didn’t realize how much he associated the smell of baking things with home until the first time he got up before she did to make her breakfast in bed and was startled by the lack of it.
#32 – Confusion
He still gets confused when she absentmindedly starts speaking in tongues, and resigns himself to a life of confusion the first time his daughter responds in one.
#33 – Fear
Terror, he decides, is when it’s 9:00 at night, pitch black and stormy, and they can’t find their daughter anywhere!
#34 – Lightning/Thunder
Or, maybe, it’s coming home to find his wife, sitting in the middle of a field under a METAL umbrella in a THUNDERSTORM—but she just waves him off and says “relax, the storm is still over 10 miles away—I’ll come in when it gets closer.”
#35 – Bonds
It’s only after they borrow Harris’s handcuffs for Adella’s school play that they find out that the key has been missing for over a decade; thankfully, Mary has a book about lock picking at the library, and eventually they get her free.