People love to say the one constant. Like life is a math problem and there's only ever one thing holding the equation together. That's never been true for me. There are always more than one.

Twenty years in, I've been cataloguing ours.

Home Depot is on the list.

When I met my husband he was a builder. A woodworker. He has the mind of an architect, in practice, in philosophy, in the way he approaches a weekend. He is not, technically, an architect. But if you handed him a problem and a pile of lumber, you'd think otherwise.

We bought our first house at 22. We spent so much time at Home Depot that the guys at the wood cutting station knew us by project. One of them used to look at the cart and deadpan: how big is y'all's house? How much trim does one house take? He wasn't wrong. We'd spend hours on a Friday night in that store. Designing. Planning. Holding pieces up to each other and mapping out how the vision in my husband's head would eventually become a room we'd actually live in. Then we'd go home, stay up until midnight hanging cabinets, listening to music, drinking Strongbow hard cider like we had nowhere else in the world to be.

We didn't. That was the point.

Seven homes later, last Friday, date night for the record, we were back.

We matched tiles to grout. He picked up a tiller and a trencher and checked every fitting twice to make sure the weekend would actually flow the way he'd already mapped it in his head. I did what I have always done. I plopped down on a stack of plywood and waited. Watched him work through the cart. Trusted the process I've seen enough times to know it always comes together.

I'm not helpful in these moments. I know this. He knows this. Neither of us cares.

That's the part that gets me. He still wants me there. Not because I can tell a lag bolt from a wood screw, but because that's just how we do it. We go together. We have always gone together.

Twenty years. Seven houses. Countless Friday nights that looked nothing like what anyone would call romantic and felt, to me, like exactly that.

He held my hand when we walked in. Same as always.