72 Years Later, One Year Later
Yesterday was my Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary. They were married early on Wednesday, August 30, 1950. They made it 48 years before Dad died. When Mom was doing some writing in a journal in the 1990’s, sometimes while waiting for Dad to get home from chores, she had this to say about their wedding day:
I remember the day we got married. It was a beautiful sunshine and a moonlit night. Mom and Dad blessed us before we went to church at 8:30 a.m. I’m sure Art and I were some nervous people, but it was a start of a good life. Not all moonlit and roses, but good and lots of blessings. We were very uninformed young persons though when I look back at it all. We climbed the mountains when they arrived and rode over the mole hills.
Seventy-two years later, the family they started numbers over 120 and continues to grow. A nephew’s wedding this weekend will be a celebration of that growth, and of family. I look at Mom and Dad’s wedding picture and I see youth, love, a special bond already evident. Happy Anniversary!
Like my mom, I have written to mark important events and to reflect back on life’s happenings, big and small. A year ago today I had a hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo-oopherectomy. Atypical complex hyperplasia in my uterus made it a prudent decision. The physical healing came more quickly that the mental and emotional, but today I feel well and I know an overall wellness like never before. Here’s a poem I wrote on a run just days before surgery:
Has Beens
My upper level
has-beens and I
took our soon-to-be
lower level has-beens
out for a run.
We spoke kindly
and lovingly
to them
we told them
we would miss them
but that we would
adjust
we’ve done it before
We will do it again
LV 8/28/21
My breasts and a few other body parts may be has-beens, but I am deeply grateful and blessed today in so many ways. It was fun for my husband Darcy and I to go visit our son Sam, the fruit of my now-gone womb, yesterday and see the apartment he will be sharing with four buddies for his junior year of college. A nice place, a nice group of young men, a nice step out of the dorms and our house. We could feel Sam’s excitement and our usually quiet son was talkative. It all warmed my heart.
There have been mountains and mole hills in our family’s history, and in my own. Today, I consider both and am amazed at what my parents did as they raised us. I sense the grace of life that underlies it all. Onward!
