Fifty years is a long time to be married, yet I remember the second night of our honeymoon as if it was yesterday. We made it to Denver, Colo., and found a Best Western motel, which was splurging considering neither one of us had a job.
We decided to go to a movie, and I used a payphone in the lobby to call my mom and let her know where we were. She was upset with me, because my uncle, who hadn’t been invited to the wedding, was upset with her. I fought tears until we got back to the motel. There, I threw myself onto the bed and started sobbing.
And then, as if I was in a cartoon, WHOOMP, the bed collapsed. Flat on the floor, I turned and looked at my new husband and started laughing. Once again, we had nowhere to go from here, but UP.
Being newlyweds, we were too embarrassed to call the front desk and tell them the bed had collapsed. So, we slept floor level.
Our destination was Phoenix, Ariz., only because I had gone to school there for three months in eighth grade and I wanted to show my husband where I had been for those three miserable months.
We basically drove by the apartment complex where my family had stayed, fed all the leftover red velvet polkadot cake to some ducks and then we headed home, because we heard there were gas shortages and long lines in California, where we had planned to visit an aunt and uncle. Like I said, nowhere to go, but up.
We moved into our first apartment in the upstairs of an old house in Fargo. Our furniture was pathetic. We had my husband’s college couch, with a piece of plywood to keep the cushions level, and a brown chair.
Our bedroom set had been my dad’s before he got married, then my childhood bedroom set and now was “ours.” I called going to bed “going to Valley City,” since the mattress was so saggy you rolled to the middle when you crawled into bed. My husband got a job with an insurance agency and we moved to Bismarck within three months.
The Salvation Army wouldn’t even take the couch. We sold his car to a scrap yard for $50. When we got to our half-basement apartment in Bismarck, our entire living room was furnished with that brown chair and a cardboard box with a wedding gift orange towel thrown over it to serve as an end table. My mom bought us a couch, which we had for the next 30 years.
Within three months, we moved back to Fargo. My husband was accepted into graduate school, but we could only afford the tuition with a job as head residents in one of the high-rises on campus. We moved in August and he started school in September.
We lived in an apartment in the dorm and ate in the dining center for the next four years. And had our first child. (She has four little meal cards taped into her baby book.) The dorm was nine floors of 172 sometimes noisy and rowdy students. As my husband used to say, “What more do you want? We’re living in a million-dollar mansion.” A dorm. We laughed.
With his degrees in economics and finance, and a new degree in accounting, we got an offer to move “back home” and work in the family business. Banking.
It was a bit of déjà vu for me, moving back to the town where I had lived my whole life. I grew up working summers and after school at the bank. Now, I was back. My husband trained for a short time at most of the positions, then settled in as a loan officer.
It was time to start working to build the rest of our lives. We bought a small house (the ONLY house for sale in town), which is the house where we still live, with a major remodeling along the way.
Life happened. I had a miscarriage, then another baby girl. Lorren refereed basketball and football games for a little extra money. Life revolved around kids, school and sports they played. Church. And a core group of friends and lots of laughs.
More life happened. Friends died, divorced or moved away. I went through an awful time of clinical depression. I got the help I needed and went back to college, finishing my degree in psychology just as our oldest went off to college. Over the years, we bought the family business. I wrote a novel, spent two years finding a publisher, then wrote seven more. We had both lost our dads before we met each other, but now we both lost our moms. North Dakota Living called and asked me to write a column. We added three grandchildren to our family. After 42 years in the banking business, my husband retired.
Then we blinked. And here we are, 50 years later from that night, when we were staring into each other’s eyes and promising to love each other through it all. We had no idea what “through it all” would be. All we really knew was the only place we had to go was up – together.
Love lesson No. 2: Starting out with “not much” helps you appreciate all the little steps on the way “up.”
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Roxanne (Roxy) Henke has never been good at math, but she can’t figure out how fast 50 years can pass. You can contact her at roxannehenke@gmail.com.
