By Haily Green
Today isn’t just an ordinary day. Today is a celebration of two extraordinary people. Today those two people are celebrating 69 wonderful years together, and I want to thank them, my grandparents, for showing me that true love really does last a lifetime.
The memories I have of my grandparents, the trips we took, the holidays shared, and the countless joyful laughs around the dinner table, I realized that love was in all those memories. It was a love that was effortless. Effortless in a way that makes you weak at the knees. Effortless in the way they still look at each other, full of love. An effortless love that not only is with them, but is shared with their children and now their grandchildren.
Summers ago, I sat rocking in the porch swing with my grandmother waiting to hear a story I had never heard before. I was like a child listening for an ice cream truck on a hot summer day. She told it with such grace and passion as if it happened yesterday. She told me the story of the day she met my grandfather.
She was 13 years old and had just moved to the small town of Harrison from southern Arkansas. After the very first day of school, my grandpa had gone home and told his mother that the pretty new girl was the girl he planned on marrying. That’s exactly what he did. While going to West Point and serving in the U.S. Air Force they were happily married in 1944. Little did both of them know that in 1944, they would start a life that only happens in fairytales.
So as I sat there on that hot, sticky summer day listening to this beautiful story of when their timeless love began, I realized that she talked about her life not as her own but of theirs together. She used “we” instead of “I.” That is what a marriage is.
My grandparents are wonderful, extraordinary people that have paved a path of love that I hope one day I will have the chance to follow. I love you both and congratulations on 69 years of marriage.
Beatiful. This is the fairytale so many of us hope for in life.
Forgive the typo. Tiny phone keyboard.