We've Been Painted :)

Since Mike and I skipped all the hoopla of a wedding to marry more simply--a ceremony at the courthouse in the town where we had met in the 1990s, a decision to save money now and vacation later, a dress that was actually a vintage nightgown and vintage jacket combo, a storebought cake for us and homemade cookies to share with the courthouse and hotel staff, a handmade bouquet--this painting is my one wedding-related splurge, and I finally treated myself to it this fall.  In August, I contacted folk artist Heather Sleightholm to ask if she had the time to complete a wedding portrait for me and Mike.  I love Heather's work, and as soon as I discovered her, I knew I wanted her to capture our simple wedding day for us.  We emailed back and forth in August and September to ensure she had enough photos and details to go by--the spring green outfit, my braided hair, our simple silver wedding bands, the wintry rainy April 2011 weather that had broken into sun just for our day and then turned into cold rain again that night, the trees that were still bare-branched, Mike's tie that matched my outfit, our courthouse in the background somewhere, and "Heather, would it be possible to add Stuffed to our painting?  :)  Maybe at our feet or in a tree, but just somewhere?"  Our portrait arrived on Halloween, and as you can see, Heather captured it all perfectly.  This is one of my if-the-apartment-were-on-fire-and-I-had-time-to-save-a-few-material-posessions items.  I love it. 

I had made my bridal bouquet of Daffodils, Pussy Willows, and Cattails.  Heather incorporated them not only into my bouquet, but also into masses of blooms on the ground around us, along with patches of half-melted snow. 

My sweet Mike, or "my big bearded friend," as I call him, with our courthouse behind him.  The courthouse is the most beautiful building in our former college town.  I used to live a block behind it when I went to school there. 

My bouquet and my beloved cream tights and T-strap shoes.  Heather even included the embroidered details on my jacket's collar. 

Mike's ring in the painting is even the simple silver band it is in real life.  Heather's attention to detail and the care she took with this just make my heart happy.  And below is our Stuffed watching over us from a tree-top.  Dear face. 

We are now blessed enough to have both the wedding pictures we had taken (with the cameras on our phones and on a disposeable camera I'd bought at Target the day before [blissfully simple, as I'd said!]) and this lovely painting too.  And where else to display it but on the mantel Dad made for our first anniversary.  It is a treasure.  ♥

♥  "An April Wedding" by Heather Sleightholm  ♥

April Violets and October Anniversaries

Today my parents celebrate their forty-third wedding anniversary.  In 1966, one of the young men my dad was serving with in Vietnam mentioned in a letter to his kid sister back home that one of his Air Force buddies could use some extra mail.  My fourteen-year-old mom dutifully put pen to paper for her big brother, my dad soon wrote back, and four years of Air Mail later, it was their matchmaker, Dad's friend and Mom's brother, who served as Best Man at their October 24th wedding.  "Some of my best work," my uncle brags of their union.  In four more years, my parents would name their first child after dear Uncle Dan.  As I like to point out to my mom, who is still upset that they don't have better pictures from their wedding day, her marriage turned out even if her photographs didn't.  

 

Before the autumn wedding and baby Daniel, though, there were those four years of letters, care packages, and rare visits home on-leave.  "I would complete soak all my stationery and envelopes in Yardley's April Violets," Mom always mentions when she talks about their correspondence.  She wrote my dad a letter a day.  Dad, for his part, sent letter, pictures, and love poems--"And your dad was really a poet," Mom always adds at this point in her reminiscences.  I come by my love of letter-writing naturally, I can't help but think, just as so many of "[their] songs" from the mid-late 1960s--"Crimson and Clover," "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and "My Girl," to name just a few--had become my own favorites by the time I was eleven.  My parents finally saw each other in-person for the first time during one of my dad's visits home.  High school student Mom anxiously waited at her parents' window in New York while my dad made the drive up from Pennsylvania.  "When I saw him coming down the sidewalk in his dress uniform. . . !"  Mom still gushes at the memory, blushingly trailing off each time she shares it.  "And I'm telling you, Vally," she always goes on, "I knew right away that he was a keeper:  My brother Eric was just a baby then and was playing with his toy cars, and your dad got right down on the floor beside him and started racing the cars around with him."  (How a man treats the very young and very old tells you all you need to know about a man's character, my mother advised me ages ago.) 

Perfumed mail, The Big Chill soundtrack of their pen pal days, and matchbox car races can make it all seem much more lighthearted than it was, of course.  "Come home safe" is written in Mom's teenage penmanship across the backs of so many of her old photos to Dad.  The scene in Forrest Gump that shows a safely-home-from-Vietnam Forrest reunited with his beloved Jenny is the one that always gets my parents, and being in the room with them while they watch uniform-clad Forrest and long-haired Jenny embrace after his years in the service almost feels like too personal a Mom and Dad Moment to intrude upon.  Their own love story didn't have to turn out this well, and we all know it.  Dad doesn't decorate family members' graves on Memorial Day without remembering the classmate with whom he enlisted and without whom he made it home.  

Tonight my parents will exchange cards and maybe catch dinner and a movie, while two of their grandchildren daydream about next week's Halloween costumes and another grandchild waits a few more weeks to be born.  The letters that started it all, still tucked into their red and blue-bordered Air Mail envelopes, have been carefully packed away since 1970 in my parents' bedroom closet, faintly flower-scented testaments to the wonder of true love. 

♥

Anniversary Love from Aunt Laurie

Mike and I stopped at my parents' house on Sunday the 15th for what we thought was going to be a simple one-year wedding anniversary dinner with my family, but my mom and my visiting-for-the-weekend aunt Laurie had been working like elves since Friday evening transforming my parents' kitchen and dining room into a Daffodil-Filled Pink Party Central in our honor. :) While I wait to collect everyone's photos from the day, I can show you two of the gifts Aunt Laurie made for us, a beautifully matted and framed photo of me from my wedding day and a scrapbook marking our first married year.

Aunt Laurie said this was her favorite of all our wedding photos, and she trimmed it in a pretty spring green that matched my wedding outfit. :) Since my bridal bouquet was mostly yellow Daffodils, she pressed some silk ones under the glass too. What a treasure she and her gift are. 

And tucked into a gift basket Sunday was a 40-page scrapbook she had made filled with images depicting our wedding, our life together, and our pink first anniversary party. There is even a page in it with a magazine clipping of a black and white cat who looks like Stuffed. :) She and I and my mom have been creating these little books for each other for years, but this one is one of my all-time favorite gifts, period. She outdid herself.

The pages above are my two favorites. She even created those paper doll-type cut-outs to look like my wedding dress and jacket and Mike's tie. :) And my Daffodil bouquet! Love, love, love.  She managed to find pictures of not only my bouquet's Daffodils but also its Cattails and Pussy Willows. "My" Daffodils are on almost every page. :)

For traditional first anniversary gifts of paper, her book and matted photo take the prize. They are just the dearest, as is she. ♥

Fall Leaves and Frog Stickers: My Pen Pal, Aunt Laurie

My sweet aunt Laurie is one of my favorite people, and she and I have been exchanging cards, letters, and other little "love notes" through the mail since I was a kid. The photo above is of our November correspondence from last year--she always makes collages and includes them with her letters, and I pass along pretty fall leaves that I know she'll appreciate. Her Halloween card, collage, and letter in response to my own arrived in Monday's mail, and although I just saw her in July for my brother's wedding, her words made me miss her even more than I already did. I have been missing my family a lot lately, as I had told her in my letter, and I wish I could be in at least three places at once. "I'd love to just appear at your door and offer some dinner and hugs," she wrote in Monday's letter. "'Sending hugs through the mail."

When my best friend died in 1995, Aunt Laurie was having a traumatic week of her own with one of her children, and I sent her a card a couple days after my friend's death to check in with her and to send love to my cousin. "Oh how I wish I could hold you and tell you everything will be okay," her letter back began. It is one of the things I remember verbatim from the haze of those first few weeks without my friend.

Knowing how I love holidays and seasonal meals, Aunt Laurie added an illustration to her Christmas letter's collage a few years ago of a woman studying a cookbook titled 10 Festive Meals You Can Make with Canned Peas. It still makes me laugh. :)

Aunt Laurie's a lover of all things Victorian, lacy, and pretty.

She writes poetry, loves to take nature walks and sew, and makes amazing Civil War reenactment costumes.

She is more than a little psychic and has amazingly vivid spiritual dreams. The pictures she takes often have orbs of light in them.  

She is soft-spoken--a bit Jackie Kennedy-ish--speaks slowly, and has a way of seemingly moving in slow motion, as well.  Her handwriting has the same almost-fragile quality. She has gentle brown "doe eyes" but can only be pushed so far before proving she's tougher than she appears.

She likes peanut butter and doesn't like chocolate. She sometimes drinks tea but adores coffee. She loves doughnuts but tries not to eat them since my uncle is always watching his weight and is too easily tempted. Her homemade bread is to die for--light and sweet loaves that come to loved ones covered in pretty dish towels.

She wraps presents beautifully. Her Christmas package is the biggest treat, since there are always linen snowflake doilies as package decorations, lovely fabric ribbons and rick rack with tree ornaments tied into the curled trims.

Her favorite color is green. When I was little, I told my mom we should start collecting something green for Aunt Laurie, and Mom asked what I thought we should collect for her. All I could think of that was green was frogs--poor Aunt Laurie!--so ever since, it has frogs and frog-related things for her. When her times are hard, I am sure to mention that "It's not easy being green," and "Have I toad you lately that I love you?" candy boxes have been known to appear in her mailbox on Valentine's Day.

She is the only person in my family who calls me "Valerie" instead of "Val."

She lives in a gorgeous old white farmhouse with her husband of 42 years and one of my cousins, she loves to garden, she gets a kick out of gnomes, and Lily of the Valley is her favorite flower.

The first gift I remember ever receiving from her was a lavender unicorn-covered diary I got for Christmas in the third grade. I still have it. For my birthday last May, she took me and my mom out for breakfast and presented me with a Rose afterward. While I was home in July, she threw me a mini bridal shower in the dining room with my mom and cousins present.

Aunt Laurie hates to be called "cute," always envisioning herself more like a sexy Ann-Margret, of whom she used to keep scrapbooks. (Aunt Laurie was thrilled when I performed in my high school's production of Bye Bye Birdie, and she and Mom reminisced all that spring about the songs and movies from their own high school years.) Aunt Laurie really is adorable, though, and even now that she is retired and has a granddaughter in high school, she still gets called "Honey" and "Sweetie" and "Sweetheart" by sales clerks and other strangers and has that air about her that makes people want to pinch her cheeks and cuddle her.

She lived across the street from my family for a few years while I was growing up, and I remember one Christmas, my mom, my cousins, and I were sitting in her living room while my mom read some silly magazine personality quiz to Aunt Laurie. "You want to go Christmas caroling with the neighbors," my mom read aloud, "but you know your singing voice isn't the greatest. Do you A.) go anyway or B.) stay home?" "Well, shoot, I'd go!" my aunt cried out in a surprisingly indignant tone, shocking my mom and making us all laugh at her unexpected response. "What do I care what they think? They don't have to like it!" It is probably twenty-five years since that conversation and I still can't hear mention of Christmas caroling without remembering Aunt Laurie's uncharacteristic outburst (and her younger sister's surprise at her boldness) and smiling.

When I was twenty years old, I mentioned during one visit that I had a small success to report. I had finally stopped biting my nails, was all, but before I could go on to explain that, Aunt Laurie quietly said, "Ah! That's good, Valerie. Small successes are good." :) She was proud of me for losing a lot of weight a few years ago but was happier to hear that I was happy and loving my life again after a number of years of not loving it very much at all. "Oh, Valerie, that's WONDERFUL!" I can hear her exclaim at every mention of something that I'm excited about.

Neither she nor I can easily stop laughing once we get started, and Aunt Laurie starts slapping her knee when she really gets going, which makes everything even funnier. In 2003, the subject of hair dyes came up while she, Mom, and I were hanging out looking at magazines over tea and coffee, and I mentioned that when Marilyn Monroe had been asked if she minded that people thought she was dumb because she was blonde, she had responded, "No, because I know I'm not dumb. I also know I'm not really blonde." Aunt Laurie loved that, being a brunette-turned-blonde herself, and laughed and laughed.

She adored her grandparents, has been with my uncle since high school, and is best friends with my mom, who rightfully calls her "Lovey."
 
Although there are phone calls and visits, as well, it is the letters that have kept us close over the years, each parcel of news and magazine clippings and recipes and dreams and quotes and fall leaves and frog stickers tying our ties a little tighter. My pen pal since childhood, Aunt Laurie can always be counted on to stay in touch, and that is no small thing to say about someone. Her jack-o-lantern-covered Halloween mail is smiling at me from a bookshelf this morning, and this year's November mail will soon be winging its way across the state to her, Kermit the Frog Macy's Thanksgiving Day Day Parade float pictures gracing the envelope. :)

Wedding Cake, Cookies, & Flowers :)

After we went out to supper last Friday night, we stopped at a Wal-Mart near our hotel to pick up cake and ice cream. Since we'll be having some kind of celebration with our families sometime in the future, this cake was just was for us, and while I wasn't picky about it, I still hoped to run into the store and find something special, and as with the rest of our wedding weekend, our luck held: The store had a simple white square cake with a spring green border that exactly matched the green of my dress. :) The cake originally had hot pink and purple flowers iced onto the corners, but I knew I could fix it up easily enough, so into my basket it went. As I paid for the cake and ice cream, the cashier commented on my hair--it was still in its braid--and the cake, and I had to explain that I'd gotten married that day and would be using this as my wedding cake. She congratulated me and laughed--"Wal-Mart is the LAST place I'd be on MY wedding day!"--and then looked puzzled when she rang up the colored pencils, silk Daffodil bunch, and small black picture frame. I let her wonder about those items, and while waiting for Mike, an elderly man spotted me standing there with my cake and kindly said, "Someone having a birthday?" I explained that it was actually for a wedding, and he nodded and said, "Ahh! Those are good too!" Mike and I thought that was one of the more memorable comments from Friday, and it was just a sweet moment. 

It was exactly the cake I'd wanted. I used to be really into cake decorating, but even had I spent a lot of time and effort on our wedding cake, I wouldn't have done it any other way. Like the rest of the weekend, it was simple and and sweet and lovely and just "us." And the little framed drawing is now up on a shelf here in our apartment, and I'm sure we'll use it on all our anniversary cakes too.

The day before the wedding, I spent some timing sewing my pocket of pictures of loved ones into my dress and attaching Sommer's ring and something else in honor of someone else to the jacket, and when those projects were done, I began baking and decorating heart-shaped cookies to share with the court house staff and hotel staff. And I saved a few for me and Mike, of course.  :)

I made the bouquet of silk flowers so I could keep it. It is all-yellow Daffodils (my favorite flower), Pussy Willows, and a few Cattails, with the handle/holder wrapped in green gingham ribbon. 

Just looking at it makes me happy. I finished making it in late March but didn't want Mike to see it until the wedding--not that he himself would have remotely cared :)--so although I wanted to keep it out where I could see it every day, I didn't have the chance until after the wedding. And today I have been married a week already and the leftover cake, the tiny framed drawing, and the bouquet will soon be on our Easter dinner table.  ♥

A Girly Wedding Hair, Shoes, and Outfit Write-Up :)

Friday--Wedding Day!--morning, Mike walked down to pick up the rental car for our trip while I stayed here to get ready and dressed. Hair and makeup were easy--my hair's naturally curly, so I just pulled it up and added the braid so it would look more special than usual (and because my mom used to do my hair like this with the big braid on top, when I was a little kid, so this was a small way of sharing the moment with her ♥), and I always keep my makeup simple enough--but I just prayed I wouldn't get a run in my tights while pulling them on. I only had one pair of the cream tights, so I was hoping that I wouldn't tear them while buckling my shoes and that Stuffed wouldn't pull out his claws around me. The contingency plan in the event of a run was just to stop by the drugstore and pick up a pair of regular pantyhose, but I'd have been telling the cashier my sob story if I'd had to do that, silly though that is. No getting-ready mishaps, though. Cream tights (that look white in all the photos) and black T-strap shoes, it was, just as I'd wanted. :)

Stuffed even let me scoop him up for a picture after I'd finished getting dressed, and no tights or skin were scratched in the process. :)

And the hour I spent getting ready, maintenance workers were outside our apartment mowing the lawn for the first time this season, so the scent of freshly-mowed grass will likely always remind me of the morning of my wedding day now. :)

My green wedding dress was actually a vintage "baby doll" nighty, but I knew when I saw it that it would work as a dress, since it seemed to match my jacket's color exactly and had the lace down the front, as well, making it look a bit fancier than your average nightgown. I had found the vintage green jacket on etsy in January and had to have a local seamstress make alterations--it was too small in the arms and shoulders--but when she finished it and it finally fit perfectly, I emailed my friend Marylou right away to tell her and added, "The wedding feels real now that I have something to wear!" :) I had fallen in love with this funky old jacket with its adorable huge embroidered collar as soon as I saw it, so to see myself in it finally and to see that it did, indeed, match the nighty-dress was a sweet moment.

As I told Marylou the week before the wedding, I never went to Prom or any school dances, so I never did the "dress-up thing," so piecing together this crazy green "everything-I'm-wearing-is-vintage-except-my-underthings" outfit was just great fun. I'd written in 2008 about my "dream" wedding gown and swore I'd never wear anything else when I married, and that wedding gown is actually in my parents' house right now--I found it after almost 20 years of searching for it, on eBay in 2009--but somehow, this green outfit was more "me," and now I can't imagine having gotten married wearing anything else. And I knew even before I finished getting ready and dressed Friday that I'd never felt as beautiful as I did that day. :)

Mike had left around 9:30 a.m. to pick up the car and returned an hour later to find me finishing the packing and dolled-up in my wedding outfit. When he saw me--smiling giddily, as I couldn't stop--in my wedding outfit for the first time, he laughed and called me "[his] little green gum ball of joy." :)

People have always told me that I wear my heart on my sleeve, but Friday, I felt like my heart really was just glowing around me for everyone to see--I just felt beautiful and happy and full of love and good thoughts. I spent the day alternately praying for people I love and thanking God and giggling and hugging Mike and then, later on, spreading the good news of our surprise-wedding, and truly, I just felt like I was glowing from it all. Hair, shoes, and makeup only go so far: I was just happy and thankful and full of love Friday. There was a quote in Country Living magazine recently from memoir writer Frances Mayes: "Happiness? The color of it must be spring green." When I read that, I clipped it out and added it to one of my scrapbooks, and it will soon reappear in our wedding album--right beside Mike's memorable "green gum ball" compliment, of course. :)

I spent some of last Thursday pinning something inside the front of the dress to honor one of my loved ones, sewing a ring that had belonged to my best friend, Sommer, into the front of my jacket, and creating a jacket pocket that I filled with photos of other loved ones I wanted to honor similarly and who had somehow inspired me and/or helped me reach my wedding day. i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart). . . .And that was my wedding outfit, shoes, and braided-like-Mom-used-to-do-it hair: Love and prayers and gratitude. Hope for new beginnings. And green gum balls of joy.  

♥

Our First Photo as Husband and Wife :)

Mr. Mike and I "ran away and got married" on Friday afternoon. :) It was, as I've told him at least fifty times since then, exactly the day I'd hoped we would have: Laid-back, sweet, simple, sunny, pretty, and fun. We married at the court house in our old college town, where we met in the late 1990s. Years before we ever even started dating, Mike and I jokingly made a pact with each other that if we weren't married by a certain date, we would marry each other, and what do you know, more than a decade later, there we were, back where it all began, driving around the campus in our mid-thirties as husband and wife. Don't ever let anyone tell you that life isn't strange.

When Mike called his parents from our hotel room Friday evening to tell them, his mom said she had figured we were up to something--Mother's intuition. :) And my mom squealed, "What?! VALLY!!!" and then laughed and called out to my dad, "Gene! Val's MARRIED!" (The phone conversations with my mom and dad are two of my favorite memories from the whole experience. I laugh and smile every time I remember them.) Mom said she'd actually told our friend Vickie recently that she wouldn't be surprised just to get a phone call from me one of these days saying Mike and I had "gone off somewhere and gotten married," so she obviously believed me all the times growing up I said I'd prefer to elope. :) Our parents passed the news along to our siblings while Mike and I went out for supper, and reading our brothers' text messages and hearing their voice mails over the weekend made it all even more fun. :) We had had our ceremony at the court house scheduled since January 31st, so to let everyone in on the secret finally has been nice.)

And now it is going on midnight two days later and Mike and I both have to work tomorrow. Girly green-vintage-wedding-dress-and-black-T-strap-shoes-and-cream-tights-and-braided-hair-and-heart-shaped-sugar-cookies-and-Daffodil-bouquet details another day. In the meantime, Val and Mr. Mike are married.  :)

A Post for Nikki, My Fellow Vintage Clothing Fan :)

I recently "met" the lovely and sweet Nikki of The Scarlett Rose Garden. She has lost more than 80 pounds--which is about the same amount of weight I had to lose when I started my own weight loss/better health journey last year--and thus has been quite an inspiration to me. Her photos and writings just exude warmth and love of life, and I'm so glad to have found her online.

Nikki designed her own wedding gown and asked today to see the one I've had in mind since I was 18, so here for my fellow vintage clothing-loving new friend is my dream gown. Mr. Mike and I can skip a "real" wedding and just head to the courthouse and I'll be happy, as "wedding hoopla" has never interested me much, but even if we got married in a trash dumpster with only the flies as our witnesses, I'd still want to be wearing this dress.  It was designed by Yumi Katsura and was featured in the June 1995 issue of Victoria magazine. I was looking through my grandmother's magazines while staying with her during the summer of 1995, and when I saw this photo, I just knew this was the only wedding gown I ever wanted to wear and even now, 13 years later, it's the one I want. The design itself looks pretty simple, so if I can't find an inexpensive dress that looks enough like this, I'll likely just create my own: An off-white gauzey long-sleeved blouse with a long skirt, a strapless cream corset or swimsuit underneath, a collar and French cuffs and faux bow-covered buttons up the back and along the cuffs...I'm sure we'll find a way to get the look I want. :) It's just such a sweet dress, and since the photo shows the model with her back turned, it's always been that much easier to imagine myself in it. With my hair pulled up and the last 30 or so pounds gone, that back-turned picture's probably how I'll actually look on my wedding day anyway. And I think 18-year-old Val somehow knew that all along, which is why the photo spoke to her the way it did. ♥

To Papa and Grandma

Tomorrow, July 1st, is my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. To celebrate, I’m making Papa’s gnocchi and meatballs and Grandma’s chocolate cream pie for my parents and brothers. As at all of our family dinners, there will be much laughter and teasing and no small amount of love. At tomorrow’s dinner, we thank Papa and Grandma for setting the example.

One Sunday afternoon while we were all visiting at their house when I was a kid, Grandma started talking about her and Papa’s wedding day. They had dated for a year and a half and were 28 and 29 when they got married; Grandma was a year older. When she mentioned how “jittery” she’d been that day, I interrupted, “Why were you nervous?!? It was just Papa!” She, Papa, and the rest of the family laughed and laughed, but it was many years before I understood that they hadn’t always been “Papa and Grandma,” let alone that they weren’t “Papa and Grandma” to each other. I laugh now, too, thinking about it, but a part of me wishes I could sit them both down tonight and say, “Really, in all honesty, you guys didn’t know that it would work out like this? You truly didn’t know that this would be your story? You really didn’t see all of this?” Forget space: just as I was as a child, I am still at least as taken aback at the thought of “Papa and Grandma” having a beginning or an end.

Had I had the foresight, I would have been sure to ask my grandparents all kinds of things about their courtship and marriage, but I didn’t have what could be considered my first date until after they both had died, so by the time I cared enough to know the answers, it was too late to ask the questions. Once when I was in college, Papa delved into the topic, but I was too embarrassed and self-conscious to discuss it in any real way. “You’re not interested in the boys yet, are you?” were the words he found, and it was more of a statement than a question. Assuming he wouldn’t understand, I simply answered, “I haven’t found any yet who interest me. I’m—I’m picky.” Feeling stupid, I half-expected him to laugh, but he didn’t, of course. He just nodded his head slowly and, squeezing the back of my neck, responded, “That’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with being picky.” Had I been braver, I’d have admitted to him and Grandma that I doubted I’d ever find a man I loved as much as I loved him—and that I didn’t think, dateless all my life as I’d been, that even if I did someday find such a man, that he would love me in return. Papa had set the bar. The summer after I graduated from college, I’d started writing a poem about him, but seven years later, I still haven’t finished it. I get as far as “You were my first hero, Papa, and the first man I ever said ‘I love you’ to,” and I again set it aside to work on another time. It has always just seemed too much to hope for: a husband as fine as my grandfather, a marriage as blessed as my grandparents’.  This is a conversation I now wish the three of us had had.

 When Grandma called one afternoon to let us know that Papa died, a few months before what would have been my grandparents’ 62nd wedding anniversary, my parents and brothers and I left our jobs for the day and raced to gather to be with her. As we sat around her in chairs and at her feet, Grandma handed me a book of her favorite poems and asked me to read “Should You Go First” by Albert Kennedy "Rosey" Rowswell. She had been reading it to herself just before we’d arrived, she explained. The last stanza buoyed her but further broke my heart; She was imagining their reunion--only five weeks away, not that any of us knew that then--and I was just aching for the past.  

“Should you go first and I remain,
One thing I'd have you do:
Walk slowly down that long, lone path,
For soon I'll follow you.
I'll want to know each step you take
That I may walk the same,
For some day down that lonely road
You'll hear me call your name.”
 

At Papa’s viewing, Grandma joined me at his casket and tried to get me to stop crying, but it was quite awhile before I collected myself enough to see and speak, and when I did, Papa’s hands were what caught my attention. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band. I asked my grandmother if she had kept his ring, and she replied that Papa had never worn one. I had never even noticed. He just never wanted one, Grandma explained, and the extra expense at the time they got married didn’t seem worth it. I nodded in understanding, and Grandma pulled me closer and said, “He always said that we were his jewels, our children and I--and later on, you kids, of course.” That set me off again, and Grandma rubbed the small of my back as I wept.
 

My grandparents didn’t exchange birthday or anniversary or Christmas presents with each other, and neither had grown up in a time or family that encouraged demonstrativeness or sentimentality. I never saw them kiss or hug. But Grandma would cook and bake Papa’s favorite foods, and Papa never returned from a walk in the woods without a bouquet of wildflowers for Grandma. He teasingly called her his “little Napoleon” because she was French—her family had come here from France years before Papa’s had arrived from Italy—and she would begin all of her retorts to him with a combination “Shhhhh!” and clucking sound. In 1993, my mom bought Grandma a book to fill out for me and my brothers in which she was to record her anecdotes and memories. A line in the book asks for a description of how she and Papa spent their days. She stayed busy with the “usual household chores,” Grandma dryly reported, and Papa spent his days “working, gardening, and picking at me.” I laugh as I reread that now, and I’m also remembering that my grandfather would often tell her, “You know what? You’re a good kid, Mum!” It would make us all smile, Papa working his charm this way on a now-blushing-but-still-pretending-to-be-annoyed Grandma. You’re a good kid, Mum!
As the final guests left the viewing, I asked my mom if she was sure that Grandma understood that she wouldn’t get to see Papa again after that night—it would be closed casket for the next morning’s funeral—and she said she thought so but went over to Grandma to see if she wanted to go up to the casket one last time before we took her home. Grandma did, and exhausted by the past few days, was gently led by some of the family to the front of the room. After a few moments, she collapsed onto Papa’s chest and whimpered, “Goodnight, my buddy.” My mom and just about everyone else in earshot completely dissolved then and hurried to help her, but I stood by momentarily too stunned to cry or move. It had just dawned on me that above everything else, my grandparents were each other’s friends. The very last thing she ever said to him taught me what I had most needed to know about marriage—and what I most wanted out of my own. After 62 years--more than six decades! more than half a century!--the very last time she looked at him, she was seeing “my buddy.” My buddy. “Papa and Grandma” was a friendship. Papa and Grandma were friends.


As a swift kick when we were already down, the morning we received the florist’s bill for Papa’s funeral arrangements, we also got the phone call letting us know that Grandma died. The only peace there was to be had that day was in the hope that they were finally (out of pain and) together again. Even in those short five weeks after Papa had died and we would speak of going to visit Grandma, it had been “going down to Papa and Grandma’s.” Before Papa had died, the only nights they had ever spent apart were those of my grandmother’s three maternity stays. Grandma had been ill the last six months of her life and had lived just as long as her doctors had predicted, but the fact that Papa passed on one month and Grandma the next still struck us as a detail most-fitting to their story. One of my second cousins told me at Grandma’s funeral that my grandparents “could have been a TV show!” As we sat beside each other waiting for the service to begin, she turned in her chair to face me and laughed in half-whispers, “Ohhhhhh, when they would start in on each other! You know, [your grandmother] didn’t have his sense of humor--she was so dry and quiet about things--but she still gave it right back to him! When we were kids, we’d look forward to their visits just to hear them together!”

Had I ever put any thought into it while my grandparents were alive, I’d have been able to figure most of this out, of course. That they were people before they were grandparents and each other’s friends above and beyond “Papa and Grandma” should have been no mystery. And I suppose I did understand these things on some level. While I was staying with them one summer week as a kid, the song “Friends and Lovers” came on the radio during lunch. Grandma liked it and asked why they didn’t make more nice songs like that. I was mortified--the song was about lovers!--and tried to change the subject. If 30-year-old Val could have a do-over of that moment, she would leave the blushing 10-year-old to her pancakes and listen more closely to the tale her grandparents were telling, for however long they had to tell it. Was Papa always your buddy, Grandma, or did he gradually become that to you? I am interested in the boys now, Papa, if you want to talk? There are no do-overs, though, so after saying thanks tomorrow for the gathering of family over gnocchi and pie, I will pray to Papa and Grandma that I paid enough attention to their story to shape a sweet one of my own.