On Our Anniversary
Thirty-nine years ago (gasp!) I was clad in white- looking at myself in the mirror, on the verge of taking a leap into the unknown. Who was this man I was going to marry? I barely knew him. We had met at camp five years earlier. He was a counselor, a college graduate, entering seminary. I was a camper, entering my junior year in high school. We had written letters to each other, and in the past year I had visited him at Fort Knox twice and he had visited me in Philadelphia twice—the second time to apply for our marriage license. I believed from his letters that he was a kind and gentle person, intelligent, witty, and honest. But life with him would mean a complete transformation for me, a journey into uncharted waters. I would be a married woman, I would be living far away from Philadelphia, and I had no idea of what the future would bring.
Ah, would that I could have been there to whisper into my young ear what the future would yield—years of adventure- moving from place to place, five perfect little children to love, to rear, and to teach, the spouses they chose (our children now too), and the twenty precious grandchildren; a home in Israel with a verdant, fragrant, fruitful garden. “Don’t worry, little bride,” I would say, “you have chosen well.”