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Village life: On late marriage

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By Jan Worth-Nelson

Sunday, June 17, 2012

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By the time my mother died at 84, she and my father had been married for 58 years.

We had celebrated their 50th with 100 friends and family in a nearby church. We hired a string quartet and provided an elaborate buffet.

My mother gave special thanks to Em Buchtel, an old neighbor who'd loaned them something like $300 in 1950 to get started. They used the money to buy an acre where my father built a house over the next five years on his days off from preaching. Together, they staked out a garden and grew vegetables on it for 40 years.

My mother wore her white satin wedding dress which had been swaddled in tissue paper in a cardboard box in the attic since 1936.

The rest of us — three kids well into middle age, spouses, grandchildren — snuggled up around them for the ritual family portrait. We look like a prototype of that disappearing species, the American middle class.
My parents' long partnership wasn't perfect and their dissatisfactions through the decades left my siblings and me with some acutely uncomfortable memories.

Nonetheless, they are buried side by side for eternity in a small cemetery within walking distance of that Ohio house and garden. That's how their generation did it.

Recently, I took my husband Ted to see that graveyard, church, house and garden. They are the incubators of my first memories. I was baptized there.

The maple trees my father planted on his property right after I was born are now more than 60 years old.

They are magnificent. And startling. It's sobering that I myself have lived long enough for a tree to turn into something so impressive.

Certainly, some things take a long time to mature. But when it comes to marriage endurance isn't automatically a virtue. Other things spring up surprisingly and bloom anew, if given a chance, still yielding a satisfying harvest.

My marriage, for example.

My husband Ted was not in that 1986 photo. He never met my parents because he is my second husband.
I had a choice my mother never had — to extricate myself from one life and launch another — in late middle age. It was audacious and difficult. Yet I am profoundly glad.

This month, Ted and I observe our seventh anniversary. We are in a mood to celebrate, and I'm here to praise the sweetness of late marriage.

I've written many times about how Ted and I reconnected years after my parents were dead. We were old Peace Corps buddies who hadn't seen each other for 25 years until 2001, when a long-buried spark re-ignited.

Ted proposed to me when I was 55 years old and he was 63. We're not going to make it to 50. But our first seven years, continually surprising and unconventional, have offered a lifetime of drama, vindication and joy.

Yes, I did say vindication. At my age I get to sip a little from that cup. I always feared I would get trapped in unhappiness, byproduct of the guilts and impositions of my youth. But I didn't. I took another path, thus offering a stubborn answer, finally, to "the dreams of all the sad women I come from," as I wrote in an old poem.

Ted's vindication was a retort to the Ursaline Sisters, who could only warn of trouble for his sin-infested soul. As we've evolved in our "relationboat," as Ted calls it, we have proven to ourselves our path was right for us.

That's one of the great things about late marriage. At the heart of it, you don't have to please anybody but yourself. I spent much of my younger life feeling guilty about what I thought were everybody else's expectations for my life — expectations I never managed to fulfill. Finally, in my 50s, I began to feel free. I married Ted because I wanted to, because it felt good and right for me.

Frankly, our idiosyncratic history is less and less what occupies my mind. When you start over in late middle age, history can be a tricky business. As my husband often says, quoting Robert Frost, sometimes what you need in life is "a good forgetter." We both came to our union tattooed with wounds and humble with baggage. We've learned to exercise compassion for times when the scar tissue acts up.

When you're old lovers you never know how much time you have left, and you don't want to waste the lovely present by fretting about the past. I have a mug from Oliver T's that says, quoting Goethe, "Nothing is worth more than this day." We both like Shelly Kopp's Eschatological Laundry list, starting out with "This is it." Indeed.

So you savor each pleasure — the breakfast at Steady Eddys, the walk at dusk, the kiss at the back of the neck, the laughs during pillow talk, the lingering weekends knocking around the house.

Here is a great part to our story. When Ted popped the question, well ... we were in bed together. Right here in Flint, on a wintry night, cozy in the house we'd bought several years before. He gave me a ring with three heart-shaped diamonds. I cried.

It's taken me awhile to fess up to this part of our story. I was a little embarrassed. But now I realize this detail matters. Whisper, whisper — even old coots get lusty for each other. After all, no birth control issues, no kids to wake you up. It's sweet.

So, the night Ted and I agreed to marry, we gave this old house in this struggling old town a shot of redemption. And we gave ourselves a spirited vote for our chances of happiness.

Miraculously, it was not too late for us, and we are making the most of it.

In one of my old poems, I wrote that I hoped "the sad women I come from" would "forgive me for being happy while I am still alive."

I never believed in heaven, so here I am, doing my best to make this crazy life enjoyable while it lasts. As I said in that old poem, maybe "even the mothers under the maples are laughing."

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Columnist and poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She is the director of the Thompson Center for Learning and Teaching and teaches writing at UM-Flint.

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