For My Husband on Our Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary
I am reliving the April after we married when we moved home to nurse a sick father, the long, ’67 Galaxie pulling the boxy little U-Haul with all our belongings. I am reliving your shouldering the RCA rabbit-eared television into the bedroom at the front of the house, your anxiety about the sin we were introducing into the camp and the potential for God’s anger to burn against us in the days ahead. I am reliving the image of you shouldering your new father to the space heater in the hallway, the gentle way you held his face and lifted his arms, soaping up and refreshing his tired frame. Or the scene when you cradled him like a feather in the middle of the night to the hospital twenty miles away. Oh, those episodes, those many times. And then the one time we came home without him. The silence. The steady rain against the windshield, the wipers as hypnotizing as a single word on the white page. And how can I forget our remaining three months with Mama, the floors creaking with his presence, the heater’s blue flames acknowledging he had been there, the Christmas tapers signaling he was not far away. I remember leaving that January Sunday morning, her stifling the tears, us waving as we eased out of the driveway onto Highway 80 in the tarp-covered truck carrying us back to our studies in the Classic City. Later, we learned she had cried all day, had said it was the saddest time of her life. But at twenty, we were blind. The scales had not yet fallen from our eyes. How could we have intuited a mother’s soft heart? What did we know of good-bye? Published: Verse-Virtual, July, 2025