There’s something I’ve wanted to say but I’ve had trouble, as a writer and as a husband, figuring out how to frame it. After any number of false starts, I think simple and direct is best. So here goes.
“Thank you, Anne:
• for seeing something in me 45 years ago that no one else in Reidsville—or on the planet—saw
• for thinking that eloping, getting married in the woods behind our professor’s cabin, and spending our honeymoon camping on the beach at Cape Hatteras was not only neat but romantic
• for choosing to live like a pauper with me through six years of undergraduate and graduate education and yet splurge all our savings on five months hitchhiking around Europe
• for leaving your graduate program in art history at Chapel Hill to become a hippy farmer with me almost a year, until we were both bored out of our gourds
• for following me all over creation, moving 17 times in 14 years, while I chased a career in newspapers
• for being an incredible mother to both my girls—and to me
• for becoming a Latin teacher and finally finding what you wanted to do in life
• for standing by me the last few months and believing in my talents and worth
• for discouraging me from taking an expedient route that wouldn’t have helped me to grow
• for maintaining an upbeat and optimistic demeanor when you must have often felt doubt and despair
• for preparing carbonade, ribs, soft-shelled crabs, daube, fried okra, lots of gravy, duck, lemon chess pie, fresh-corn tamales, pisaladiere and all the other home-made goodies that have sustained and buoyed me these last few months
• for hearing the padre when he said for better and for worse. Yes, we’ve had it better, but we’ve certainly experienced worse
• for being willing to pick up and move, even to become a beachcomber, to accommodate my plans, or lack thereof
• for turning our house, wherever it was, into a home surrounded by flowers, thyme, basil and lots of birds
• for getting the Winnie dog after 30-some dogless years
• for reminding me of how lucky we both are to have our health, our family and each other.
