272 Years

By Melanie Dale

My daughter got married last summer. Not one to shy away from a microphone, I wrote a toast for the reception and knew then that I would share it with you for our Love After Babies series, although at this point I think I’m in the stage of life that’s Love Before Babies, as in grandbabies, or Love with Baby Adults. What a ride Alex and I have been on these twenty-seven years of togetherness, twenty-four years of marriage. 

Many of you have watched my kids grow up over the last ten years of my monthly essays with Coffee + Crumbs, snapshots of our life together spilled out in black and white across your screens. So now, I invite you into the beautiful old house with the wraparound porch, chandeliers, and gleaming hardwood floors where we held the wedding. Out back underneath the big tree, Ana Banana has just married her high school sweetheart, looking so grown up in his Army dress uniform. The friends and family who watched these kids grow up are seated around the dance floor inside, bellies full of brisket and shrimp and grits from our favorite local restaurant, sipping wine or lattes from the coffee truck in the parking lot. I wish I could share some with you now through the screen. 

Alex, father of the bride, love of my life, takes the microphone from the DJ and clears his throat. Didn’t I just marry him? Wasn’t this just us a second ago? When did we grow old enough to host a wedding for our daughter? I look at him with his grey beard, and he’s somehow even more handsome than he was. His toast is perfect and before I can express that I don’t want to follow that, he hands the mic to me, and I’m standing up in my green dress before all of you and I say:

“One of my most vivid memories from childhood was my grandparents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. It was at the Campbell Club in Owensboro, Kentucky. Several of you were there. A Kentucky girl through and through, I ordered my favorite dish, Hot Brown, which I was disappointed to discover was not nearly as good as my mom’s. She leaves out the tomatoes and doubles the cheese. 

“It was a night of discovery. It was the first time I had Hot Brown that wasn’t Mom’s, and it was the first time I saw my relatives drink wine. I thought we were teetotalers up to that point, so when the wine came out I really knew this was a Big Moment, and it was. My grandfather presented my grandmother with a custom-made necklace to commemorate their fifty years of marriage. I’ve never seen anything like it, with its tassels and engraved R, for Rickard. I’m wearing it tonight.