When You and I Were Young

in a few days, my wife and i will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary.  on that day in 1968, we were both twenty-one years old and had just graduated from college.  i had begun my first teaching job.  my wife had just completed a summer of working as a "temp" in houston while living with one of her sisters there.  we were excited to begin our lives as adults, establishing our first home in a tiny three-room apartment, where you had to go through the bathroom to get from the living room to the kitchen.  the apartment was in the basement of a house built into the side of a hill overlooking a ravine, and our windows were just above ground level.  both of our jobs were miserable, but we were happy together there, learning how to cook and how to put up with each other's little irritating mannerisms.

over the years we've lived in six different towns, as we've followed jobs and college degrees from place to place.  our last move took us to a place where we lived for thirty years, the longest time we stayed in the same house.  when we made our move to our home here at the age of seventy, that was our most difficult move.  it was hard to leave the house that had nurtured our lives together for so long and to haul the accumulated belongings that we had collected over so many years together for the 250 miles or so from our old home to the new one, but we survived it.

we've learned, i think, how to care for one another, to help each other heal old wounds from our childhoods.  we've learned to work together, each giving up our desires to control how the other lives and thinks.  we've learned to make decisions together, neither insisting on having it one way or the other.  all-in-all we've had a wonderful life together, a far happier life that either would have had alone.  neither of us can imagine a life without the other, though some day we may have to experience that reality.  we hope that day is far in the future.

we've raised two wonderful children, children who can't believe that their parents are growing old and won't be the same as they've always been.  as i look back, i see that i thought my dad would always be there, and i thought the same of my mother until her illness ended her life when she was just a couple of years older than i am now.  i never thought about my dad's aging or the difficulties he faced trying to keep his home and yard going on his own after my mother died.  now i understand how hard it was for him, as my wife and i try to figure out how to reduce the demands of yard work and house work, how to make do with less.

it would be wonderful to have another fifty years together, but that's unlikely.  at best, we might have another twenty or so.  we can hope that the years remaining will be healthy ones, that neither of us has to leave the other to live in a nursing home.  we can hope to live independently, caring for our home and each other, but we never know what life may bring, as my dad discovered when my mother became ill and soon was gone.

may we each have the strength to face the challenges that life throws at us.  may we relish each day filled with joy and good health, each day we get to spend with the person or persons we love most.  may we live with gratitude and with good will for all those around us.  shalom.