Love is that simple
It’s the little things that make a life together
Cauliflower love
By Erma Bombeck
We looked a little ridiculous – two 47-year-old adults sitting alone at a card table in the back yard with party hats strapped under our chins.
It wasn’t the way I had imagined our 25th wedding anniversary gala. I had fantasized a large white tent decorated with flowers and housing a six-piece orchestra. Several hundred guests would be milling around. My husband and I would exchange diamond-studded matching tennis bracelets. He would romantically feed me out-of-season blueberries, and the orchestra would play our favorite song, “Our love is here to stay,” while we swayed together on the dance floor. Later, we would throw streamers from the deck of a cruise ship and swill champagne while our misty-eyed children waved from the pier.
The reality was, our kids had thrown a couple of hamburgers and a few hot dogs on the barbecue grill, gobbled them and left, leaving us to clean up. The table held our bounty: matching one-size-fits-all bathrobes and a shower head fixture from my husband with five positions ranging from gentle spray to pin-you-against-the wall.
Twenty five years. There had been a time when we would have gotten a standing ovation for being married that long. Not anymore. Kids looked at you like you were some kind of prehistoric animal. Your contemporaries shook their heads in disgust and whispered to one another. “She’d leave him in a minute, but she’s too out of shape to shop for a new one.”
When I read the newspaper, I found myself turning frequently to the section of anniversaries, people who had survived 50 or 60 years of marriage. In some strange ways they were my future, sitting side by side, not touching, and staring straight at the camera. Her hair was thin with a touch of pink scalp showing through. So was his. They wore matching glasses.
I knew it only would be a matter of time before no one would be able to tell us apart. Already our ideas, our stories, our ideology and our attitudes had blended to such a degree we barely knew where one began and the other left off. Whenever he told a joke, I knew the exact moment he was going to say, “Help me with the punch line, honey.”
Mentally, I checked the list of things I was going to change about him 25 years ago. He was still late all the time and still left-handed. He was with his cronies less, but had replaced them with other distractions like jogging and fishing. I threw him a vegetable or two every week and he was satisfied he was eating healthy.
I wondered for the first time if he had made such a list of my annoyances and what kind of progress he had made.
Bill scraped the last hamburger from the drill. “Do you want this?” I popped it in my mouth. “This is nice,” he said. “Did you know that Richard Burton bought Liz a rare diamond and she bought him a full-length fur coat?”
“What would I do with a fur coat?” he snorted.
I looked at him as he returned the folding chairs to their original boxes. We had gone through three wars, two miscarriages, five houses, three children, nine cars, 23 funerals, seven camping trips, 12 jobs, 19 banks and three credit unions. I had cut his hair, and turned 33,488 pieces of his underwear right side out. He had washed my feet when I was pregnant and couldn’t see them and put his car seat back to its original position 18,675 times after I had used it. We had shared toothpaste, debts, closets and relatives. We had given one another honesty and trust.
He came over to where I was seated and said, “I’ve got a present for you.”
“What is it?” I asked excitedly.
“Close your eyes.”
When I opened them, he was holding a cauliflower that comes packed in a pickle jar.
“I hid it from the kids,” he said, “because I know how you like cauliflower.”
Maybe love was that simple.
