The most important decision you’ll ever make

Learning about love from my grandparents

On our eighth wedding anniversary, we laid my grandfather’s body to rest, my grandmother’s urn in his arms. They chose a plot in their church’s graveyard, surrounded by farmland, back in the corner beneath a pine tree. While my mother and her sisters said goodbye, I watched a monarch fly low through the nearby grasses. Monarchs, ladybugs, ripe tomatoes, barn cats, quilts, molasses, and peonies, thick with blooming petals, have always been signs to me that my grandmother is near. Those images seem to capture the essence of her, to me.

Photo by James Wheeler on Unsplash

A list, now, to conjure my Gramps: striped overalls and worn boots, tractors, trains, and airplanes, pocket-sized New Testaments, thorough scratches on a happy cat’s head, the color orange, lemonade, and tickles. Yes, tickles.

So many apt words were used to describe Gramps at his funeral; he was a faithful servant of God, a devoted husband and father, a lover of the earth and of farming. But the first word that comes to my mind when I think of Gramps is playful. He was always hugging all of us grandkids up, tickling us under our chins, smiling with his eyes all crinkly and mischievous, no matter how tired he was from a day of working on his farm.

He and my grandmother were playful together, too. They laughed, they teased, they hugged, they winked. And beneath all of that, there was a deep and true friendship that gave rise to all that fun and all the love. It was easy to see, just in the way they drank coffee together, that they would do anything for the other and that they were the best of friends.

On the day of Gramps’s funeral, my husband spent the entire day chasing after our very busy eighteen-month-old. I was able to be present, to grieve and to hug my cousins tightly with both arms. I noticed that all of the cousins’ spouses gave the gift of being the “on” parent so that we grandkids could focus on saying goodbye. It was exactly what Gram or Gramps would have done without complaint.

Gram once told my mom that the most important decision you make in your life is who you marry. I believe that’s true. Who you spend your days with colors absolutely everything, and when you come home, you want to come home to peace, to contentment, to laughter and love. It was clear to me, watching all of the grandkids and great-grandkids at the funeral, that we all took the love and friendship of Gram’s and Gramps’s marriage as an example of what we hoped to find and to nurture in our own marriages.

Michael and I first met when we were eighteen. We started dating at twenty, got married the week before we both turned twenty-five. And now, in the flash that everyone warned us of, we’ve been married eight years. I hope, hope, hope that we are lucky enough to see the next sixty years together, like my grandparents did. They knew they were lucky. They cherished each other. They laughed and laughed, oh, how they laughed. One of the biggest joys in my marriage is how much we laugh together, too.

In honor of our anniversary, here are some images that capture my beloved: Hot coffee, black. Huge headphones. Happy, tongue-lolling dogs. Ice cream in waffle cones. Flannel sheets. Chaco tans. Lovingly tended gardens. Open windows. Surly Furious. Bee Balm and hydrangea. How lucky am I, that when I see one of these things, the entire world of him comes rushing toward me?

When you think of someone you love, which images come to mind? I would truly love to hear them. Please comment on this post or reply to this email if you’d like to share your list with me.

Wherever you are and whomever you’re with, I hope you’re surrounded by love and laughter.

With love from my kitchen table,

Kaia

*The second photo in this post is of Bodie, Michael, and me with one of my grandfather’s Allis Chalmers tractors. He collected and restored them throughout his life, and my cousins brought one to the church for his funeral.