The Middle

Meet and marry.

That's how it works

in stories, biographies, poems.

Love stories, whole lives,

are edited down

to those three words.

What happens in the middle?

I wonder.

That’s what matters most,

isn’t it?

How did they meet?

Was it interesting? Different?

Was it love at first sight?

Or was it learned?

The journey — their life together —

begins when they meet,

not when they marry.

Sometimes, however,

it ends with meeting

and never gets to marriage.

When my maternal grandparents met,

my grandfather was already engaged

to a girl in Australia.

He wrote her,

after eight short weeks,

and broke the engagement.

He had a new love,

a better love.

And he would marry her —

an Irish girl with big, brown eyes —

before the year was out.

When my paternal grandparents met,

my grandmother was engaged

to a boy in Arkansas

who pumped gas for a living

and lived in a chicken coop.

My grandfather told her on that first night,

“You can throw that ring out the window, baby,

because you’re marrying me.”

My grandmother thought he was an asshole.

They were engaged one year later.

And they’ve been married 56 years.

Times have changed,

but love has not.

My maternal grandparents died

less than 20 hours apart.

He went first

in a separate building

across town.

And, without any knowledge of his passing,

my grandmother slipped quietly away.

We didn’t say a word.

We didn't have to.

They knew.

They knew all along.