A Cup of Comfort for Couples (5 page)

“What do you mean, ‘Touch him with my toes'?” I asked.

“Touch him with your toes. It's as simple as that.”

“But, Nonnie, how is that supposed to help me have a long and happy marriage?”

She closed the oven door and turned to me. “Sweetie, you and Dan will have many arguments about the littlest things. And after some of those silly disagreements, you won't feel like sharing your bed with him. Be thankful that you have someone who loves you to share a bed with. Be thankful that you can touch him with your toes.”

I had my doubts. How could touching toes ensure a lasting, happy marriage? Then again, who was I to question the validity of something that obviously worked for them? All I could do was ponder the possibility as I waited for Nonnie's delicious chicken and for my own marriage to begin.

A few months before their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, Grandpa passed away. Since then, Nonnie has not spent one night in the bed they used to share. I'm quite certain that each night she imagines the feel of Grandpa's skin against the bottoms of her feet and the warmth that always radiated from his legs.

In the nearly two decades that my husband, Dan, and I have been married, more often than not I've used my toes in a not-so-gentle effort to encourage him to roll over and stop snoring. But there have been many times when, because pride and a stubborn Italian streak make it too difficult to apologize out loud, I gently touch his leg with my toes to say, “I'm sorry. Let's break down the barriers between us. Let's connect.” And some nights, I place my feet mere inches from his leg just to feel his presence, grateful that I have someone — that I have Dan — to go through life with.

I am saddened by the certainty that someday I will no longer be able to touch Dan with my toes. But I am eternally grateful to my grandparents for their simple wisdom. For I am thankful to have someone who loves me to share a bed with, someone I can lie next to every night and touch with my toes. And when my children and my grandchildren are about to take their own nuptials, I will give them their “inheritance” as casually and as offhandedly as my grandparents gave mine to me: Touch toes.

—
Carolyn Huhn-Sullivan

A Love Worth Waiting For

O
nce upon a time, more than three decades ago, to be precise, an Oregon writer met a Stockholm doctor in a San Francisco restaurant and they ended up touring the city together, talking and walking, walking and talking. The next weekend, he would be in Seattle, so she followed, and again they enjoyed many hours of talking and walking, walking and talking. As the woman drove south to her home in Oregon while he flew home to Sweden, she had the strange feeling of leaving her best friend.

When the two platonic friends had parted, they'd said they would not write. Yet, their letters crossed in the mail and continued across the continents, sharing careers, families, philosophy, their mutual love of nature. Surely they would never meet again, so the letters were honest and without guile.

Two years passed, and the Swedish doctor came to work in Seattle for a year. The man and woman met again, and began to fall in love. But he had a family to whom he was committed; she acknowledged that and honored his integrity. Once again, they reluctantly said farewell, and she went on to marry another.

Over the years, she would wonder about the man and ponder the what-ifs and if-onlys.

Nearly twenty years later, the woman had a dream. In the dream, the man stood in her kitchen with his wife. The wife — without sadness or anger — was turning over her husband to the woman. With a start, she awakened:
What could her dream mean
?
What on earth was happening in his life
?

At the very same time on the other side of the world, the man typed the woman's name into the Internet. Nothing. For months, he browsed the web, searching for the woman. Then, on this side of the globe, she typed in his name. Finally, they connected. His wife had died. She had divorced. Neither had forgotten the other.

Once more the letters and now e-mail crossed. Early one July morning, the woman got a call. She hadn't heard the man's voice in two decades. He was at a medical conference in Denver. Within three hours, she was on a plane, risking everything on a spontaneous surprise visit. In a convention room filled with three hundred people, she found him. Twenty years spun back in time, and they were young again; nothing had changed.

Nothing but circumstances, that is.

In early November, the man flew the woman to his Sweden home for a two-week visit, which felt like a honeymoon.

They went shopping together to decorate the new home he had just built. They wound through the narrow, cobbled streets of Gamla Stan (Old Town Stockholm) and clambered four flights of a centuries-old building to meet his eighty-five-year-old mother, who greeted the woman with a hug. She met his three grown children, who thanked her for making their father so happy and presented her with a gift upon her departure. She met his best friends, and together they laughed like old companions.

They visited the cemetery on All Soul's Night, when families light candles and small lanterns on the graves. He spoke of the numbness, the pain, the daily walk through the woods to this green gravestone. At the wife's grave, the woman burst into tears. “I always wanted you but not at this price, never at this price!” she cried. The man and woman held each other, and came to understand that “for all things, there is a season.”

Each day he brought her breakfast in bed. Once more, they talked and walked, and walked and talked, and the days were seamless, fluid, without effort. They cleaned, and they cooked, and they entertained. They listened to music and read aloud. They lit candles morning and evening against the cold November darkness. They traipsed the woods, and he showed her favorite places: the meadow the young parents had cleared late each spring for the children's Midsommar Festival, the swimming rock, the enchanted hollow tree where the kids once played.

They threw supplies into a duffel bag and climbed into his boat for the ninety-minute trip through the Stockholm Archipelago of 24,000 islands to his century-old cabin. The Baltic suddenly turned angry and wild, and she clung tightly to keep from being thrown from the banging boat while he steered them safely on.
I would
trust my life to this man
she thought.
I already am
.

They hunkered in the one-room cabin while the wind pounded at the red plank door. As the corner fire warmed the room, they stripped off layers of clothing and loneliness. Candlelight reflected in the tiny windowpanes and one another's eyes in this wilderness on the edge of the world.

Each day they laughed and loved and learned more about the other. Each day they marveled that life just couldn't get better. And each day proved them joyously wrong.

Then, these two people who so savored living alone agreed they would live together. It was only as obvious as eating and breathing. “We have two wonderful places to live in, we love each other, and the rest is just details,” the man said.

He introduced her to Tanzania, East Africa, where he had worked with HIV/AIDS for years. Unsatisfied to be simply a tourist, she asked the universe to steer her toward something important to do. The very same day she met a local woman busy stirring a pot of
ugali
in an outdoor kitchen, and the two talked. The woman met her new friend's sister, who invited her to see her village school.

Ever the adventurer, the woman climbed onto a crowded, rickety bus and rattled 10 miles south of Dar es Salaam to sprawling Mbagala, where they got out and walked through dusty lanes where tourists never go. “
Mzungo
!
Mzungo
!” small African boys shouted at the white woman. Babies looked her way and burst into tears, goats brayed, and eyes followed until they stopped at Fatuma's tiny home, where thirteen tots danced to the beat of a goatskin drum in a dingy room without toys or books.

The next day, the woman returned with school supplies and asked about the hand-high outline of cinderblocks in the yard.

“My dream is to build a real school,” explained the middle-aged, divorced mother of four.

“Let me help,” her new friend said.

When the couple married in Oregon and again in Sweden, they asked for school donations in lieu of gifts, and the cinderblocks grew higher with each visit. Fatuma named her new school Bibi Jann Day Care Center in honor of the woman (
bibi
being Kiswahili for grandmother). Eventually, the school grew through grade five and evolved to become Bibi Jann Children's Care Trust. AIDS orphans and the grandmothers raising them would come together under GRANDMA-2-GRANDMA to create goods to sell, and STUDENT-2-STUDENT began to educate the children, with sponsors worldwide for both programs. The journalist became a philanthropist/ social worker/fundraiser.

Together at last, the man and the woman would enjoy eight American grandchildren, four Swedish ones, and some two-hundred African children who know them as
bibi
and
babu
. Together, they would travel the world, plant gardens, create homes in both their countries, and work to remedy the cause and effects of a terrible disease. Together, they would grow into contented old age and ever-deepening love — a love spread over five decades, three continents, and two centuries. A love worth waiting for.

—
Jann Mitchell-Sandstrom

The Anniversary Gift

“I
can't get out of the car!” I yelled.

“Oh, dude, I'm sorry.” Jeff walked around the back of the Explorer to the passenger side.

The gash from my C-section ached as I maneuvered out of the open car door. I slid between our car and the one right next to us. Its tires sat on the yellow line.

“It's over the line!” I grumbled.

“I know,” Jeff said. “Kel, I could move our car.”

“Where?” I said. “The parking garage is full.”

He shrugged as I inched my way out, taking his hand.
Happy anniversary
, I thought. Tears threat-ened, but I held them back. I had cried every day for the last thirty-two days; I did not want to cry today, our tenth anniversary.

Ten years, married to the same person. A milestone. We had planned a trip to relive our honey- moon in Mexico, had made the reservations a year in advance, only to cancel them months before the trip.

“It's safe to say you won't be going,” my obstetrician, Dr. Clark, said at my first appointment. “This pregnancy is high risk. There's anywhere from a twelve to fifty percent chance something could go wrong.”

I nodded, frowning. I both wanted and feared this pregnancy. My oldest son, Aaron, had been born two and a half months early due to a nasty case of toxemia. For a few days after his birth, it was unclear if either one of us would live.

But we did, and Jeff and I wanted to have another child. We told ourselves that pregnancy is risky no matter what, that we could handle the challenge. The statistics were so broad, there was a good chance this pregnancy would be a smooth experience.

I wasn't sure I ever believed that.

At seven months pregnant, I was admitted to the hospital, just as I had been with my first son. The difference this time was that my placenta had sprung a leak, which put only my second son's life in danger instead of both of our lives.

After twenty-four days trapped in a hospital bed, I gave birth to Noah, who weighed only 4 pounds but was otherwise healthy. However, at two months early, he needed to stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit until he was able to eat on his own.

Jeff and I shuffled toward the elevator, through the skyway and a maze of hallways to another elevator, and finally to the NICU.

Noah slept peacefully, swaddled in a pastel blanket, a hat perched on his tiny head. Around us, monitors attached to all the NICU babies beeped in different pitches, what we joked was the NICU orchestra.

“Can you get the screens?” I asked Jeff.

He nodded, looking around the unit.