Last week was my wife and my sixth anniversary.
*Pause for audience applause*
Anniversaries are like birthdays for your marriage, but they are also unlike birthdays, in that they celebrate an actual accomplishment.
I mean, unless you want to argue that birthdays are a celebration of the accomplishment of your mother giving birth. Because all you really have to do to achieve a subsequent birthday is not die. And since I don't see people having "Mom" themed birthday parties, I'm gonna say that birthdays are like personal New Year's Eve celebrations: Much ado about celebrating the passage of time as an accomplishment.

Now anniversaries are an entirely different beast. Every year of marriage is a legitimate achievement, worthy of celebration. Hell, anniversaries are important. You don't want to take for granted the success of simultaneously negotiating two lives (at least) without complete implosion. Marriage is work. It turns out that "forever," even for humans, is a pretty long-ass time. And so, every year, at the very least, ya'll earned yourselves a cake. More than likely, a night out is in order.

Last year, our dog Grover took us on a trip to the Veterinary ER for our anniversary. It was, and forgive any potential hyperbole, the absolute worst fucking anniversary ever. So, the wife and I decided to bring it back to basics this year. Get our nostalgia on. And since our relationship poked its budding head out of the soil in Boston, we headed back to the Fens for our weekend celebration.

Pictured: My wife and my relationship, as a metaphor, in Boston

I found a sweet little B&B in Brookline that was to serve as our launch pad for a variety of yesteryear adventures. However, this piece is not about our anniversary escapades, per say, so I will just list them here for those of you who want to squee over how cute we were:

1. Went to a Sox game (a la our 1st and 3rd anniversary - got the W).
2. Got breakfast at Brookline Lunch, scene of our first date and subsequent marriage proposal.
3. Went shopping at my favorite site the Eastern Trading Company (under new ownership but same amazingness).
4. Saw Solo at the same movie theater we saw our first movie together in (which was Knocked Up, which is a horrible first movie together choice, fyi).
5. Ate an incredible dinner at Craige on Main, where we have eaten for previous anniversaries as well.

Essentially, we let out two years of anniversary during this one trip to Boston. We needed it, and we'd earned it.

So, now let me tell you about the B&B I selected, because that's the real star here. The building was a two story Victorian-esque house, that had been "converted" into a six-suite hotel space. I use quotes around converted because there was very little actual conversion. Which is to say that when you walk into the B&B there is a high-ceilinged space that serves as a make-shift lobby. Make-shift in that what denotes this room as the lobby is that it has a small desk placed at the foot of the staircase where the manager sits, and boxed cereals and a Keurig machine rest on a fold-out card table along the other wall. The whole space is about the size of an adult elephant. I apologize for my lack of solid square-footage metaphors. But an adult elephant really feels right to me.

The manager at the time of our check-in was a lanky Asian kid, probably about 22, with bounding energy and an easy smile. He showed us where we should park our car, where we should store our keys, and assured us that we could help ourselves the cereal and coffee all day, every day. My wife accurately described our arrival as remarkably similar to the first day of college orientation, meeting your RA, and being shown to your room before exciting ice-breakers, to be held in the common room.

With our car situated, we sat in the two small chairs placed in front of the desk. The manger sat behind the desk and began typing into his laptop computer. With the size of the desk, and the subsequent size of the chairs used to accommodate the desk's miniature frame, the scene looked more like an elementary school parent-teacher conference than a couple checking into a hotel for their anniversary weekend.

"Oh, our lobby is also our dining room!"

A few clicks later, and the manager told us we were all set and handed us the key to Room 1. He then made a Vanna White arm gesture with his right arm, as if he were about to invite us behind the desk with him. Instead, his outstretched arm stopped as the tips of his fingers came in contact with the frame of the door to his right, our left.

"Right this way."

"Here is it," he said gleefully.

Our room was literally one foot from "reception." It was also one foot from the aforementioned Keurig machine. Our door wasn't one of those heavy duty hotel doors either! You know the 3-inch thick wood block doors used in hotels to seal out the riff-raff and hall noise from disturbing your stay and the pleasantness of their hospitality. No, I'm fairly certain I could break our wood door over my knee. It seemed like the original door from whenever in time this aging estate was erected. What I'm trying to say is that from the bed in our room, I could hear every word said in the lobby clearly. I could hear every cup of coffee brewed in the lobby. Clearly. If you came in late from your night out at 2am, we could hear you. If you had to get up early to make it to the airport, but needed that cup of coffee before you snuck out at 5am, we heard you and the two coffees you made.

Did I mention this was our anniversary trip?

Which, dear readers, means that I was (somewhat) less worried about the noise being made in the hall, and more concerned about any noise we made being heard clearly in the lobby. To make matters even more disturbing, the afternoon/night manager was an older Polish man, maybe 55 or 60, who sat at the desk with his 14-year-old son across from him. That places the son directly in front of our room. Like, we would hit him if we opened the door too quickly. I am not making this up. They mostly spoke to each other in Polish and it seemed as if the dad was helping his son with homework the lion's share of the time.

My wife and I contemplated the reality and potentially calamity of having anniversary sex that would actively double as this kid's home-schooled version of sex education. I can't emphasize how close these people are to our room. They wouldn't hear the faint unmistakable sounds of a couple having sex: Grunts, bed squeaks, the occasional scream or yelp. No, they would hear every syllable of dialogue. Every slip, every slide, every grab. It would be the opposite of Pay-Per-View. It would be paying to be viewed.

We temporarily put off the problem, as we were happy to have a place to throw our stuff before heading to the Sox matinee. And frankly, after a day in the sun and a night out on the town with an old friend, our getting-old ass's decided to get a "good" night's sleep Saturday night, and let Future Matt and Future Wife deal with this shit in the morning.

Which is exactly what I . . . well no. I took a shower in the morning. I had to wake up. As communicative as I am 98% of the day, I am equally unnecessarily hostile and argumentative post waking up and pre-coffee. So, yah, I took a shower.

What I meant to say was . . . Which is exactly what my wife did first thing the next morning while I was in the shower. Cause she's a boss and knows how to ask for reasonable requests nicely without passive aggressively insinuating that our current room is more of a "joke room" better utilized as a breakfast space for guests and not as a tourist terrarium for whichever guests are too introverted to ask to be moved. It was probably better she did the asking, in retrospect.

Thankfully, they had a room upstairs available for our second night, and the morning manager from our check-in switched us with very little trouble. I should add that the rooms were quite nice. The design aesthetic fit the age of the building and the rooms were clean and had attached bathrooms. Really everything we need in a B&B.

After settling in to our new room, I thanked my wife for her bravery in putting our weekend needs above her desire to not "cause problems." And then, like any loving couple on their anniversary, we had medium loud sex directly above the front desk and the amiable day manager.