The other day, my niece mentioned it was her 11-month anniversary of dating her boyfriend. They were out celebrating the big day with dinner and a movie. I am happy for them and I hope the number of months they celebrate together continues to grow.
I remember the early years of our marriage when I would share how many days and weeks, much to Mike’s amusement. “You’ve been my husband for 79 days,” I’d announce randomly at dinner. Sometimes I still like to think about it that way, to keep my math skills up and be amazed that 1,346 weeks have gone by already. I won’t convert that into hours.
Still, the folks I meet in my work often tell me they reached a far bigger number — 55, 60, 65 years together. I suspect it’s a landmark not many of the folks in my generation will reach. I try to imagine if the person I was at 18 would be someone I’d want to marry and spend the rest of my life with, and what a big leap of faith it must be to join hands at that age and hope you would grow and stay together through a lifetime.
The other day, I was lucky enough to celebrate a pair of high school sweethearts, Terry and Tannis Seets, who have made it to the 50-year mark. They met in drama class at Prescott High School, got married at 19, found jobs in stores that no longer exist here — Yellow Front and Super X Drugs — and settled into Prescott, starting a family and becoming good neighbors and friends to the folks who lived nearby.
One day, Terry was raking the leaves for the widowed neighbor next door and bagging them up for another neighbor to spread on their garden as mulch. After finishing the job, he noticed his wedding band was no longer on his finger and was probably stuck in one of the many bags of leaves he had gathered. He spread the leaves across the neighbor’s garden, and they sifted through each bag, hoping to find the ring. No luck. A few days later, they borrowed a metal detector from a friend and tried again. Still nothing.
Sometimes you can be doing everything right and bad things still happen. But you get through it and move forward, focused on what is truly important. A ring may be a symbol of love, but it’s just a symbol. The love remains, even if the ring is lost.
The young family moved to Cottonwood a few months later, and the ring faded from their minds. The following summer, though, they got a letter from their neighbor. While picking berries in their strawberry patch in the backyard, they saw a glint of gold peeking out between the leaves. There it was, Terry’s wedding band entwined in the stem of a ripe strawberry, a small miracle growing in the sun.
I don’t think you can get through a half-century of marriage without reflecting back on the many challenges you had to face to get this far in life together. It’s hard to imagine being so confident at 19 to say, “Yes, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with,” and be so right.
To be able to hear just a few of the stories their daughter, Heather, shared at their celebration was a gift to me and my husband, as we try to imagine what our own lives might look like in another 25 years, if we are lucky and healthy enough to make it to that milestone.
Every Valentine’s Day, the stores fill with long-stemmed strawberries drizzled in chocolate and icing, a romantic treat to celebrate the person you love most. But as I walk down the grocery store aisles, I’ll be thinking of a strawberry that blossomed and grew many years ago in the warm Prescott sunshine and brought hope and joy to a young couple — a reminder of the miracle of God’s love for us all.