Seventeen Years

Trigudis

Lisa Slayton, holding the hand of Henry, her beloved husband of close to fifty years, asks, "Where will we be, my love, in another seventeen years?"

Both retired, they sit side-by-side on their back porch, gazing out over their half-acre of lawn and into the woods beyond, ablaze with the cacophony of those bugs that emerge from the ground every seventeen years.

Henry scratches his full head of white hair. "We'll be ninety-two. Ninety-two. Can you believe it?"

Lisa chuckles. "I can hardly believe we're halfway to eighty, Henry. Ninety-two? Ohmygod..."

Henry picks up his glass from the small plastic table and takes a sip of iced tea. For Henry and Lisa, it's the perfect beverage for a day such as this, a day that makes them feel like the sun is touching the ground. "Well, think back seventeen years ago. We were fifty-eight, still working and looking at age sixty. 'Be here before you know it,' is what you said. Remember?"

Lisa nods and adjusts the glasses that had slid a few millimeters down her nose, red from working in her garden. "I do. Sixty sounded so old to me then. Now? Ha!" She brushes off a cicada that flies onto her blue capri pants. "I'll take sixty again. Wouldn't you?"

Henry nods as he sips from his glass. "I think so. I still had nature's right hip, not the metal and ceramic thing that's in there now. And I could still bench over two-hundred pounds. Now? I can't even bring the bar down to my chest, my shoulders are so sore and tight."

Lisa pats her age-spotted hand over his age-spotted hand. "Your metal and ceramic hip and my metal and ceramic knee. It's oldsters like us that keep those orthopods in business."

Moments of silence pass. Not total silence. The wind chimes that hang from their porch play their own unique form of music. And the cicadas, buzzing away in that distinctive mating call of theirs. Thinking further back, Henry says, "And then there was forty-one."

Lisa lifts the ice-filled pitcher of tea and pours some into her glass. "Forty-one?"

"Yeah. We were forty-one seventeen years before that. Michael and Melinda were still in high school. As for us, our body parts still worked the way they always did, more or less. Our eyes and ears and joints did okay. Arthritis wasn't even on our radar."

Lisa takes a sip. "You're right about that. We had other concerns. Our jobs, paying the mortgage on this house and budgeting like mad so we could send our kids to college."

"Those were the days," Henry says, flicking away a cicada that lands on his leg, just below the hem of his tan shorts.

Lisa thinks out loud to seventeen years before that. "Geeze, we were only twenty-four."

It takes him a few moments before he gets what she means. "When we met, you mean. Nixon was president. The first Earth Day had just passed and it was a month after those students were gunned down on the campus of Kent State. It was the first time I remember seeing cicadas. I had just moved into an apartment with a couple guys and began working for the state."

"And I had just started my teaching career, still living with mom and dad."

"You were still hurting over that breakup, you've told me. Adam was his name?"

"Yes, with Adam, my college sweetheart. And then you came along." She shakes her head, almost in disbelief picturing what still looks so vivid; and, in some ways, so recent, even after all this time. "I'm sitting at the bar with my girlfriend, minding my own business, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn around and see this cute guy grinning at me. He says hi, we start talking and that was that."

He shakes his head. "Well, not quite. You were hesitant in giving me your phone number, if you remember."

She nods and giggles. "Only because I didn't think I was ready to start dating again. Alice, my girlfriend, thought it would do me good, would lift me from my funk, to get out and be among people."

"I thought you looked so hot in that minidress. Most beautiful pair of legs I ever saw. I can still picture you sitting there as I stood off to the side, drink of Tom Collins in hand, trying to work up the courage to approach you."

She looks down at her calves, the same calves that helped to draw him to her all those years ago, four cicada cycles ago, to be exact. They're thicker than they were then, with surface veins and other blemishes. She can no longer fit into that minidress that she still keeps out of sentiment. And her hair, once brown and long, is gray and just brushes her shoulders, much shorter than when it flowed past the middle of her back. Once in a while, she looks at photos of her twenty-something self and finds it hard to believe that the girl standing on the beach in a bikini is the same woman she is now. Well, sort of, because she knows damn well that in obvious ways, she isn't the same woman, nor is her dear Henry the same man.

Seeing her frown, that man gently pats her knee. "Honey, don't look so sad. We're alive, reasonably well and we still have each other. Not only that, we still make love. How many couples our age can say that?"

"Damn few, I reckon," she says. "And you still don't need Viagra, you old, super-stud, you."

No, he sure doesn't need Viagra, and feels damn lucky about that. He's got friends that had their prostates removed, surgery that ended their sex life. He also feels lucky about having a wife who still wants to get it on. Who WANTS to, mind you, for he knows that she doesn't do it out of obligation. She does it because she's married to a guy that she still loves, that she feels closer to when they're doing in bed what they've been doing for the past half-century. He sees the ravages of age on himself as much as he sees it on his beloved Lisa, the wrinkles and sagging skin, the aching joints and stooping gait. Yet somehow, they've been able to put all that aside, to stay close physically as well as emotionally. "That's the power of love, baby," he says out loud.

She doesn't look at him in a weird way, for she's used to Henry coming up with lines out of nowhere. "The power of love. Wasn't that a song from the eighties?"

"Correct. Originally sung by Jennifer Rush. Later, covered by Celine Dion. See, my memory is still intact after all."

"I'm impressed."

"As I was hoping you would be. Anyway, I was just thinking."

"I figured. About?"

"Just what we talked about. Still having sex lo these many years." He pauses to take another sip—and to tell her something he knows he doesn't say often enough. "I still love you, Lisa. You know that, right?"

She shoots him an 'aw, come on,' kind of look, the look a teacher might give a student that gives a ridiculous answer. "Yes, I know that, even if you don't say it that often. But you show me in so many ways. Which is the most important thing." She takes a few sips. Then: "And by the way, I love you, too. As if you didn't know."

Lisa and Henry Slayton stop talking for a while, content to just sit, sipping their tea, listening to the wind chimes and the cicadas on this hot, lazy June afternoon. But Lisa can't stop thinking of what she asked Henry less than a half-hour ago. Where will they be the next time these buzzers make their appearance? Ninety-two. They'll be ninety-two. Oh, for heavens sakes. Going by actuarial stats, average American lifespans, neither of them will be around. But maybe they will. Or at least one of them will. She can't imagine life without her beloved Henry. The thought of it tears at her gut, bruises her heart. "Ohmygod...no." She shakes her head and rubs her eyes.

Henry throws his arm around her. "You okay?"

She looks up at him, tears a-flowing. "I'm fine. Just thinking about the future. Just thinking that I never want to live without you. That I hope we're both around when those horny little guys we hear out there come back."

Henry resisted getting emotional when Lisa first brought it up. But now he can't. He just can't. Old school that insists grown men shouldn't cry, be damned. He holds her while his own tears flow. "I never want to live without you either."

Teary eyed, they continue to hold each other as the minutes tick by. Then they stop, move apart, gaze into each other's eyes and begin to laugh. Then Henry says, "That felt good. One needs a good cry every once in a while."

Lisa reaches up and brushes back a strand of hair that falls over one of Henry's reddened brown eyes. "Yes, one does. But now maybe we should focus on the present. Not worry about what might be in seventeen years. Not think about being ninety-two or even a day older than we are now. Like you said, we're alive and reasonably well. We have today, right now, and our love endures. That's what we know and that's all that matters."

The afternoon wears on, an afternoon of ringing chimes, buzzing cicadas and two people who adore one another sitting side-by-side, holding hands and smooching like they did in their youth, when they were two love-struck people just starting to make their way in the world. And yet, despite all the talk about living in the moment, they still wonder what the future might bring—and if they'll actually live to see the return of those pesky little buzzers.