377 Days - Blog #52 70 years of love

I only have pieces of it, shared over a cup of tea or in a tangent towards which a conversation in the living room had veered. I know a few facts worth relating, but I’m sure my cousins and aunts and uncles have different shades of these details.

I know that she was walking down the street one day and some handsome guy pulled over to offer her a ride home.  Her family knew his family.  They knew enough to be concerned that she developed an interest in him.  Because his father had a reputation… a reputation it took us another sixty years to fully comprehend.  But they went away to New Hampshire one weekend.  They came home and announced that they were getting married.  Her aunt (Kate?) thought there was a reason for that sudden plan.

 poor Kate doesn't like the camera

 happy day

But they got married at St. Peter’s.  She borrowed the dress from her friend.  The world was at war.  But he was home.  He had money from his military service that he sent his mother.  She used that money to help them buy a three family house further down the street from where they met.  Nana Rose and her sister moved in, while his brother lived upstairs with his wife and their children.  By their fourth anniversary, the third baby girl was on her way.  That baby girl was my mom.  Before their fifth anniversary, girl number four.

There were parties.  Fabulous parties.  Indeed, I think they were a little bit crazy.  With Uncle John and his many guests.  With the lady who would lie underneath the clothesline with her dog.  With the couple who owned a toy factory and never brought the booze, but drank plenty of it.  Nana Rose would come down at midnight with a pot of coffee and sandwiches so everyone could go home and get to church the next morning, after which the kids got to clean up the cellar.  I can only imagine how full those ashtrays were.

Within ten years, there were five girls and a boy.

It was time to build a house.

He built the house with her father.  On a piece of property that was once a farm, but was being subdivided for post war housing developments and the Hotel Mt. Pleasant.  There were still parties in the cellar.  They went out every Saturday.  To Howard Johnson’s or the Hotel Barre.  

He worked two jobs.  He had a window washing business.   She worked all day and night.  Cooking and baking and cleaning and sleeping on the floor beside her children’s beds.  She hung her laundry outside.  She filled the wood stove with everything.  She ironed and drank her bottle of beer.

There was a sixth girl.  The older girls went off to college.  All of them.  They got married.  They started careers and families.

Grandchildren who visited the magical happy attic and got to take a magical candy from the jar for the ride home.  There were afternoons of baking.  Winter days of sledding and shells.  Easter.  Christmas.  And Sunday dinners.  And the special weekend sleepover when one could see the yellow bathrobe come down the stairs to have some bacon at his seat at the end of the table.

There were birthdays and graduations and more cousins and more Christmases where he sat on the steps waiting with the uncles for the presents.  

Then sickness.  And change.  She was the last to say goodbye before they closed the casket.  But not really goodbye, because there were always stories about that first car ride or the journal she would keep every day to be able to say what happened if he ever disagreed.  The candy jar that never left its place in the pantry.

Then someone found all those party photos and more stories came clearer as something else started to fade away.  

A love story.

But, not just between them.  The love they gave to their children and grandchildren, who spread it to their children and students and patients and clients and peers and church members and community.  

And all this is just a tiny glimpse.  A tiny, tiny glimpse of what became a marriage seventy years ago today.