The Language Of Love
The recent death of former President Jimmy Carter revealed a love letter that he had written to his wife Rosalynn after they had been married for two years. Carter had been away from her and wrote these words to his love, "My darling, every time I have ever been away from you, I have been thrilled when I returned to discover just how wonderful you are. While I'm away, I tried to convince myself that you really are not, could not be, as sweet and beautiful as I remember. But when I see you, I fall in love with you all over again. Does that seem strange to you? It doesn't to me. Goodbye, darling. Until tomorrow, Jimmy."
Rosalynn and Jimmy were married for 77 years – they were eighteen and twenty-one years old when they married. She died in 2023 and of course he died in January of this year.
Valentine’s Day is less than a month away as I write this column on a very snowy day at the Homestead. Reflecting on the romance of the Catrters got me to thinking about my own relationship with my spouse of 42 years. We always buy each other cards for every holiday and our birthdays – Steve always gives me a romantic card as well as a funny one. I pretty much do the same thing and I will jot a line or two about how much I love and appreciate him. We do leave each other littles notes but I don’t think that either of us have ever written a letter like Jimmy wrote to Rosalyn. And for a fleeting moment, I was like, “Oh no! Are we not showing each other our “true love”?!
I mean, when we first got married, we gave each other “cutesy” names – he was Bwinky and I was Boinky. Don’t judge us, we were only twenty-one and twenty-four years old. On second thought, go ahead with your judgment, we totally deserve it. We had some rather risqué comments in our cards to each other. We can still send some steamy texts to each other.
After further pondering, I realized that maybe we don’t express our love in written words all the time – but we do in our actions. It’s the little things, like him taking out the garbage, scrubbing the toilet, and removing all of the snow and ice from my car in frigid temperatures. He surprises me with frozen drinks from Sheetz and treats that I love. I turn all of his clothes the right way when I am doing laundry and try my best to match up his socks. I keep his medicine orders straight and buy him some bottles of bourbon that I know he would never get for himself because of the price. He spends all Spring and Summer up in our woods cutting up the trees that have fallen, hauling them back down to our yard, where he splits and stacks the logs so we can use them to heat our old house in the fall and winter. I try to help out by loading up the wood wagon and bringing the logs into the house. I also get up some mornings and scoop out all of the ashes from the fireplace before we build a fire for the day. We slather and lather each other up with our pain relief ointment. He silently goes along for my insistence of having a professional family photo taken every year. I tolerate his hunting and fishing, just as he puts up with my bird feeding and watching obsession.
Sure, we fight – quite honestly, just about each and every day – we live together, work together and it’s a lot to handle much of the time. We have battles over who gets the TV in the living room, because neither of us wants to watch the one in the home office or in the spare bedroom upstairs. We compromise after some bickering and sometimes I find the two of sitting on the couch together – he’ll pop in to watch bits and pieces of my Hallmark movies and I will quickly view his Forensic File and news shows. It’s a battle of the sexes each night over the covers and who we think is hogging more than their fair share of the bed. But we still say, “I love you” to each other before we drift off to slumberland.
We’ve stood by each other during sickness and in health, when it felt like it was the two of us against the world, and during the death of three of our parents and my brother. We get annoyed, frustrated, and angry at each other, but we also love, respect and admire each other. Maybe we don’t have a flowy, romantic letter to each other – but we have each other and I think that’s a beautiful thing.