The sweetest time

I lost half of a very nice pair of earrings last week, so I was going through my jewelry box trying to decide what to wear when I came across a locket. Inside were two pictures from 1972 and they reminded me of how the biggest portion of my life began.

I fell in love with a man who asked me to go to the park with him and see what ducks do in the rain. For the next ten years we played tennis and backgammon and bridge. We knitted sweaters together. We were in charge of our church's youth group and rode bicycles with them, camped with them, spent lock ins at the church with them (and our little dog, Ninna.)

We studied together, worked together, shared his big recliner while we watched television and for the most part felt like we were the neighborhood "Joneses." Life was so good.

Then we found a way to make our dearest dream come true, or at least that is what I believed, and we set out to add children to our perfect family, but it turned out to be the beginning of the end. It was an end that took nearly thirty years to come to a head, but it was still the end.

We had wildly different ideas of family and children and how love can be apportioned. It is sadly amazing how that changed everything. By the time we ended our marriage I had really forgotten how sweet it was in the beginning, but there was that sweet time.


And it was very good.