I came across a picture postcard of downtown Coeburn, Virginia, where my wife Janet grew up. If it had been a little bit larger the picture would have shown her house just off to the left.
My eyes, however, went to the main focus of the photo which was the downtown street with the stores on one side and the little mountain river on the other with a couple of arched bridges across it. Back in the late fifties or early sixties, the little river overflowed its banks and almost swept downtown away. That’s when the Tennessee Valley Authority came in and dredged the river, created a little park and put in the arched bridges.
By 1970 the town moved this old log cabin to the park and renovated it to be the community center. One Saturday afternoon the town dedicated a fountain in front of the center. I was the area editor for the Kingsport, Tenn., newspaper so I drove an hour up into the mountains to report on the gala occasion.
I stood on the bridge to take some pictures then moved in closer when the mayor’s wife broke a bottle of champagne on the fountain as the high school band struck up “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Coeburn only had two thousand people so turning on the water at the community center fountain was a big event.
Janet and I didn’t actually meet for another two months, but by happenstance she saw me that day. She and her mother attended the festivities—rather, her mother dragged her there because everybody else who was anybody was going to be there so they were too.
“Do you know who that man is on the bridge?” My future mother-in-law always had a sharp eye for details at major social events.
“No, why should I?” Janet replied.
On reflection after all these years I take comfort in her disinterest in a random stranger standing on a bridge. I also took comfort when she told me later she had been impressed with my writing in the newspaper. She said she assumed I was some forty-year-old man who was already married. It wasn’t until we met face to face and talked two months later that she took notice.
This is my advice to anyone going through a loved ones’ things after cancer or some other disease has taken them away. Don’t think of it as a sorrowful duty to be endured. Think of it as a new opportunity to experience the thrill of why you fell in love in the first place.