The Two Chairs On The Lawn

What I told Harold at breakfast

In the morning I poured his coffee and I said it plain.

“Sunday is our day. I don’t want to let them take it and I don’t want to spend it mad. So here’s what we’re going to do.”

He waited.

“After church, we’re going to carry two of your mother’s chairs out onto the front lawn. And we’re going to sit down facing each other, and we’re going to say it all again. Everything we said the first time. In front of God and whoever’s still standing around in the yard.”

Harold looked at me over the rim of his cup for a long moment.

I was braced for him to say it was foolish. He is a practical man. He fixes what is broke and he leaves alone what is not, and a woman wanting to remarry him on the grass in front of the neighbors is not a thing you can fix with a wrench.

He set his cup down.

“I’ll oil that wobble,” he said. “Can’t have you tipping over in front of the Methodists.”

That is how Harold says yes to a thing. That is how he has always said yes.

I did not invite a soul

I want you to understand that we did not plan a second party to replace the first one.

I did not get on the phone and call the family and say, come see, my children wronged us, come watch us do it right. That would have been its own kind of fuss, and it would have been a way of keeping score, and I did not want to keep score in front of God on my anniversary.

I told exactly one person, and that was by accident.

Saturday I ran into Delores from the choir at the Marsh market, by the canned vegetables, and she asked was there anything special going on for us this year, she’d heard something about a dinner. And I said no dinner, but Harold and I were going to say our vows over again on the church lawn after service tomorrow, just the two of us, if the weather held.

Delores got a look on her face. I did not think much of it. Delores always has a look.

“That so,” she said.

“That’s so,” I said, and I bought my green beans and went home.

I did not know that Delores from the choir is married to a man who is on the phone tree, and that in a little country church a thing like that does not stay the size you tell it. I found that out on Sunday.