Morning Thanks--an improbable couple

Truth be told this many years later, there were some--even friends--who thought the two of us more than a little improbable. Me?--I thought they were crazy. You weren't the uptight farm girl they thought you were, and I wasn't the radical they were sure I was. We were, back then and now, pretty much cut from the same fabric.

You may remember how my sister said coming to Chicago for a weekend visit would be a good thing--"you can take out Barbara Van Gelder--you know her? She's just gorgeous."

"Know her?" I said. "She went with a roommate--two, in fact. Sorry, sis, that's next thing to disgusting."

There was a ball game--Dordt vs. Trinity. If I have my directions right, I was sitting on the north side bleachers when you walked in, an entire playing floor away. You were wearing an orange sweater that spoke volumes, and in the twinkling of an eye whatever reluctance I had vanished. We went out the next night and saw one of the worst movies ever made. I don't remember the title, and I don't want to know.

No matter. I was done in, taken, smitten; and, even though it's taken years for you to admit, you were too.

In March, we hit tolls on our way north through Chicago. We'd already developed the system: you grabbed my little coin purse out of the glove compartment and handed me the quarters. It was dark in the car, but when you put your fingers into that purse, you found more than quarters. But that ring wasn't much of a surprise. We'd been talking. You got a job in Phoenix, you'd told me. I didn't even know you'd applied.

That ball game was late January, 1972. By June--June 27--six months later, we were married in a fever in Orange City, Iowa, by a man who became Pres of the college where we both worked for a lot of years.

And all of that, all of us together, is good, still really, really good. 

This anniversary is the first time in 46 years that we're apart. You're in Oklahoma babysitting a darling little granddaughter, not even thinking of me; and I'm up here alone with our blue Russian feline, looking down on a flood plain. 

But after 46 years, all that distance between us--that's no problem. We'll find a way to celebrate when you get back. 

And even if we don't, we've already got most of fifty years of celebration behind us.