She was only sixteen when I asked her to marry me. At the time I barely had two nickels to rub together. So when I proposed I handed her a rock from my driveway and asked her if she’d accept it until I could do a little better. Surprisingly, she said yes! In January of 1975 she finished high school on the 10th. On the 15th her father allowed her to get her drivers license, and on the 25th we were married.

It’s scary how fast forty-five years have passed by. We began our lives together in a tenant house on my father’s farm. When it rained outside it also rained on the inside. We rarely dined out or went to a movie. We had a fifteen inch black and white television set with a fuzzy screen. To change channels I had to climb the pole outside and rotate the antenna. A vacation meant packing a borrowed tent and cooler into our Ford Pinto. To put it mildly, we were broke. But we were in love. There were always flowers on our kitchen table. We picked them in the fields around our little house. Some may have just been weeds that bloomed, but they were flowers to us.

It’s been quite a journey that we’ve shared together. Nowadays our roof doesn’t leak and flowers on our table come from a florist. Our television set has a 65 inch screen with a remote. We’ve traveled to forty-nine states and three countries.

This coming weekend we’ll celebrate by traveling to my wife’s motherland, New York state and tour the Big Apple. A first for either of us.

I can imagine what a few of you are probably thinking. A boy from Mississippi married a girl from New York? Yep. It’s been a fantastic journey together, odd as our union may seem.

Just like the first time I saw her, I still get goosebumps when she walks into the room. I’ll never understand how I got so lucky. It had to be fate that brought us together that day at the library.

Our forty-five years together have flown by faster than a New York minute, so it’s probably appropriate that we finally pay that town a visit. I can only hope we have several more in store as we continue growing old together.

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Rick Algood
January 23, 2020