Dear Person Who Is Missing In Action.....

.....right now. I only tease, because I am happy and supportive of your being away with one of our sons. You are gone to watch young men hit a ball around and to watch those same young men run between small squares called bases. I love that you are able to do this and that you are given this gift of time with someone whom we both love and treasure.



I also love and appreciate how you call me each day when we are apart to tell me what joy and pleasure you are experiencing.

We have actually realized that today is our anniversary. Normally we forget about it every year. 1965 is a long time away, isn't it? To say that it has gone by in a flash is almost an understatement. A few blinks of our eyes and, "Whoa, it's 43 years later!"

Here we were in 1965...black and white on our wedding day. We were "both black and white" then, believing that we had it all figured out. Low and behold, how ignorant we were.

Do you remember when we were so poor and you had to go to a workshop and we had only one tube of toothpaste? You took that little tube and squeezed out a noodle of paste on a plate so that I could brush my teeth when you were gone......
remember helping me to shave my legs when I was the size of a beluga whale with our first baby?.......
remember when we had $50.00 a month to spend on groceries?
So many memories!

And here we were several years ago in Living Color!
We have had our losses; both sets of parents gone by the time we were 32, aunts and uncles gone and the incomprehensible loss of a grandchild.

But here we are still together! We have managed through the years to weave the threads of our life together, each of us bearing separate colors and weights to make a whole cloth of beauty and wonder.

And, "Look, look, see, see!"..we did actually have defined chin lines once. We truly had a "bloom of youth"! Now we are gently muddling into the puddle of old age, but by God, we are splashing in that puddle together.

I love you.