It was eight o'clock in the morning as I puttered around in the kitchen. The sun was already up and it promised to be another beautiful August day. But, this wasn't just any day. Today was our twenty-eighth wedding anniversary.
Could that possibly be true? Just thinking about the number made me shake my head in wonder. I still thought of myself in the same way that I always had. However, a quick glance in the mirror was more than enough to remind me that I no longer resembled that young, thin twenty year old that had walked down that aisle so long ago.
There are no regrets for me, though - No, not a single one. The past twenty-eight years had seen us raise a family and make quite a life for ourselves. Some women may have had worries about their spouse's fidelity at one time or another. That was never a concern for me. Bill has loved me the same ever since we had our first date as juniors in high school.
It may not have been love at first sight, but Bill has this persistence about him that is so hard to resist. Rather than being forceful or bullying, my Bill has a charm to him that could melt through even the most obstinate soul. We dated throughout the rest of our high school years and we got married after he had completed his junior year of college.
I smiled and shook my head as I remembered the outrage that our announcement had elicited from our families --
"You're much too young!"
"You two have no idea what you are doing!"
"Are you both out of your minds?"
- but, Bill eventually wore them down with that way of his and we were married with the best wishes and blessings of both of our families. Twenty-eight years ago today I had walked down that aisle as an innocent young lady and became Mrs. Samantha Rogers.
We moved into the apartment that Bill was living in already while attending college. Looking back now, we laugh at how small that apartment had been. But at the time we thought we had everything that anyone could ever hope to have.
In our living room there was a battered old couch that he had found at a Salvation Army store and a combination television stand and bookshelf made out of some old lumber and cinderblocks. If company arrived, we had four mismatched folding chairs that we would hurriedly drag out of the closet. It's little wonder that we didn't have company all too often.
The bedroom consisted of one dresser, a small closet, and a TV tray borrowed from his Aunt Dorothy that served as a nightstand. The bed had a full sized mattress that was lumpy and had a permanent dent in the middle of it. That bed had been our one big purchase together. We found it at a garage sale two weeks before our wedding and I still laugh at the memory of the two of us struggling to carry it up the stairs to the apartment. It's a wonder than one or both of us didn't end up with broken bones that day!
Every girl dreams of a lavish honeymoon spent in some very romantic setting - dining on the finest gourmet meals and drinking the finest champagne while her husband showers her with gifts to show how much he loves her. Our honeymoon, however, didn't quite live up to that dream.
With Bill still being in school, that left me with my big job as a receptionist at a dentist's office as the sole wage earner. If you have ever held a similar position you can probably figure out that we barely had two nickels to rub together. We spent our wedding night at the apartment and the next four days at his uncle's camp on Loon Lake.
You know something? Those fantasies about a dream honeymoon were nice, but no two people were ever happier than we were on our budget version of that dream. That first night at the apartment Bill and I made love for the first time.
Yes, you read that right! While it is true that we had been seeing each other for a long time by then, we had never "gone all the way". My strict catholic upbringing and the good Sisters at St. Anthony's Catholic School had instilled in my brain the notion of premarital sex being a sin. Those same Sisters might have blanched if they had any idea of some of the things that we did do before the big night, but technically I had remained true to their demands. (This is one instance where all of Bill's charm didn't get him everything that he wanted!)
We may have waited for a long time to make love for the first time, but we soon set about making up for lost time. Those first years we could hardly keep our hands off of each other! Every day seemed to bring a new discovery -- a new source of pleasure and what made it special was that we made that journey together.
We made love every chance that we could. It's still a wonder to me that Bill was able to maintain his grade point average during that time. It seemed like ninety percent of his time was spent in bed with me or at least with him trying to get me into bed. There was even one memorable time that I went to the campus to meet him as he was getting out of class and we didn't even wait until we got home! We tried, but we only made it half way across the campus before we veered off into the woods and enjoyed each other.
As I mentioned earlier, we were both raised as Catholics. You know what that means -- no birth control. As we neared our first anniversary I found out that I was pregnant. I will never forget the look of happiness on Bill's face when I told him the news. It was the same look that I was to see three more times in the next five years as our family grew quickly.
Money was in really short supply during those early years. Bill added a full time job to his full load of course work and I worked off and on whenever I wasn't too pregnant to do so. Luckily we had a lot of help and support from our families and somehow we always managed to just get by. We gradually moved from one apartment to a slightly larger one with each addition to the family.
Bill had graduated with his engineering degree and it didn't take him long to start climbing the ladder at work. As I said before, he was so smart and had such a way about him that management had him on a fast track to success. Sure, there were tough times -- such as when our son went through a phase where he seemed destined to destroy his life with a series of bad choices or, after having given birth to four healthy babies, our last two attempts had ended in miscarriages -- but we pulled through them each time as a family.
I was very lucky. As Bill's salary grew, he made the decision that I shouldn't work anymore. We both felt that the children needed a full time mom and no career could ever replace the love and support that I was able to shower on our little ones as they grew.
So, as I stood in my kitchen on the morning of our twenty-eighth anniversary I was able to look back at a life that had been truly blessed. Our baby was now twenty-two years old and had just graduated from college. She had recently taken a job as a registered nurse in Florida. It was sad that she would be living so far away from us, but we were so proud of her for having the courage to take a job so far away from home without a worry in the world.
