Today is my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, which they will celebrate by doing a little hiking and exploring around their new home in Vermont. They met half a century ago at a small Presbyterian college in western Pennsylvania. My father, who had had his eye on my mother for a while, finally decided to get her attention by putting an ashtray on her head during a school assembly. Against all odds, this approach worked beautifully.

So here's a little poem for them.

Nostalgia

            Dawn Potter

It was darker then, in the nights when the cars

came sliding around the traffic circle, when the headlights

speckled with rain traveled the bedroom walls

and vanished; when the typewriter, the squeaking chair,

the slow voice of the radio stirred the night air like a fan.

Of course, the ones we loved were beautiful—

slim, dark-haired, intent on their books.

The rain came swishing against the lamp-lit windows.

The cat purred in his chair. A clock sang,

and we lay nearly asleep, almost dreaming,

almost alone, nearly gone—the days fly so;

and the nights, like sleep, disappear without memory.

[from Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004)]