Family Ever After

I'm thinking about marriage today: Why people get married. Why people stay married. Why they don't. Why they choose what they do. And what we can learn from their stories...

My mom's parents. They were married for 52 years. Their wedding was in September, which, for wheat farmers in Kansas, was threshing time. My grandmother never hesitated to tell the story of their getting married and then her feeding a huge herd of threshers.

I love how, in this shot, they are standing close to one another -- like they want to touch one another but knowing, also, that it somehow isn't appropriate. Love. That.

My dad's parents. They were married for 69 years and 2 months. Their first date was in 1939; they went to see Gone with the Wind at a movie theater in Dallas.

Everyone who ever met them knew -- I mean, really knew in his bones -- that they adored one another. Always. Unconditionally. Entirely crazy about each other. Oh, that's not to say that she didn't want to pinch his head off at times or that he didn't really spend time in his garden for more than the beautiful tomatos. But it is to say that they somehow figured out how to grow the patience to accept and love one another. Always. No matter what.

My mom and dad, married 48 years next month. Here, they are standing in the Fellowship Hall of the First United Methodist Church in the small West Texas town where my grandparents (first picture) owned the Dairy Mart. My dad is clearly on his best behavior here; I can totally imagine the whole cake-eating ordeal going an entirely different direction. Totally.

Amazing how this milli-second nearly 50 years ago has been frozen in my family's history. How Mom and Dad likely don't remember this moment in their lives, but they know this photo intimately.

Funny, too, how Mom was trying to channel Jackie O, white suit and pill-box hat. Not so funny that JFK would be assassinated five months later.

My in-laws, married 47 years next month. I am so amazed by my father-in-law's hands here. They remind me so much of another set of hands...

Rest assured that this picture was taken somewhere in Ballinger, Texas, not in the tropical locale the palms suggest.

My father-in-law's parents in Talbert's Hollow ("Hall-er" to the locals), Tennessee. They divorced in the 1960s, but, somehow, it always appeared to me that they remained family in a way.

Oh, and, Mama Lois turned 94 last year, and she is still cute as a button!



Metro Man and I on August 10, 1996. I thought we were fairly young until I took this picture out; then I realized how old the picture is (It's totally untouched here!) and -- by extension -- how old that must make us.

But I am learning that old can be good. Old can be better. I can see the coming decades from here, and I am excited -- inspired even -- to learn the lessons of patience and grace that others have learned and emodied so well.