Good morning, my friend!
Ain’t love grand? Did you have a happy Valentine’s Day? Was there chocolate involved? There surely was over here! We did our part to keep the nice folks at Russell Stover in business.
This June, Kevin and I will celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary. That’s pretty amazing, since neither one of us is 44 yet. That’s obviously not true, but how on earth can we have been married that long? Yes, we were young; I was 21, he was 23, but still—44 years!
Our youngest son is getting married in just a little over a month, so we have had weddings on the brain lately. (I may end up wearing jeans and a t-shirt. When did trying to find a dress that looked even passable on you become almost impossible? The first one I tried on made me look just like the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella. That was a hard no. Bippity-boppity-no way!) My son recently told me he and his bride-to-be had just secured their honeymoon plans. Made me think of ours. Of course, there’s a story to tell there…
As I mentioned, we were young when we got married. Kevin had been out of college for a year and a half, a real, live grown-up, working a grown-up job. I was a month out of college and didn’t have two dimes to rub together. We was poor. There wouldn’t be any flying off to the Caribbean in our future. There wouldn’t be any flying anywhere!
There was, however, a beautiful resort only about an hour away in northern Wisconsin. Ahhh, northern Wisconsin—the honeymoon capital of the world! Outside of the tiny town of Cable, Wisconsin, there sat a place called Telemark Lodge. I had been there several times as a kid. My parents liked to go there to listen to a band that played big band music. There was an indoor pool, an outdoor pool, and a hot tub that my mom would take my cousin and me to now and then. I thought we’d died and gone to swimming pool heaven! There was a huge, towering stone fireplace in the lobby, and the smell of cedar was evident the minute you stepped inside. It was very “lodge-y” looking, even before “the lodge look” was a thing. There were (I think) multiple restaurants inside and, of course, rooms in which to stay.
If memory serves, there was a separate ski chalet with a “Rathskeller” where skiers would hang out après-ski, warm up with a drink, and polka—two of Wisconsin’s most popular ways to warm up!
So, back to our honeymoon. We had secured a honeymoon package that included a couple of nights’ lodging and a meal at their fancy restaurant (Emeril Lagasse worked there for a time!). It also included unlimited access to all the recreational amenities—the pools, tennis, canoe trips, and possibly horseback riding. We decided to start the day bright and early with a canoe trip down the Namekagon River, and then see what the afternoon brought. Well, our “morning trip” turned into an all-day affair.
The lodge brought us to a certain spot where they had a bunch of canoes. We were given paddles and life preservers and told where to exit the river for pickup. AOK! We thought. I had canoed a lot with my dad since I was a kid. We had this! Easy peasy, right?
Kevin held the canoe steady as I climbed in and up to the bow. He pushed us out a bit into the “deeper” (I have this in quotes for a reason) water and climbed in, sitting at the back of the canoe. Clunk!
We were sitting on the bottom of the river.
The water level in the river was so low at the time that with our two adult bodies in the canoe, there wasn’t enough water to keep us afloat. No problem, right? Surely the entire length of our trip wasn’t going to be like that.
Kevin, being the dashing and strong young man that he was, stepped back out of the boat and got behind to push us along a bit. Just when it looked like we might have enough H2O to carry us along, Kevin would climb back in, and to the bottom we’d go again. Out he’d climb to scootch us along some more. And, mind you, it wasn’t like when I was in the boat alone, I was buoyant! He literally pushed the canoe down the river while the bottom scraped along the rocks of the riverbed!
This went on for hours!
I can’t say that I get “madder than a hornet” very often, but I was fit to be tied! This is our honeymoon! This is horrible! How could you drop us off at a dried-up river and do this to us? At one point, as Kevin was scooting the canoe past some larger rocks, I recall taking my paddle and smashing it against one of them. Yeah, I was mad.
What seemed like three days later, we reached the place we were told to exit, and we got out. It wasn’t much longer before the canoe person came by in his truck to pick us up. We wondered how he knew to come pick us up then, rather than hours earlier. When we got back to the lodge, Kevin spoke to someone at the main desk and probably told them his new bride was madder than a box of frogs because our “full use of recreational amenities” resulted in one excruciating “push” down the river. I believe we were compensated somehow, though I don’t remember exactly how.
When we got up to our room to change out of our wet clothes. Kevin opened his wallet to find all our money soaking wet. I think those dollar bills probably soaked up what little water was left in the Namekagon River. He peeled those bills apart, one by one, and laid them out on our TV set to dry. I captured the moment on film.
My hero. Please note the old-fashioned TV, telephone, and harvest gold furniture!
Maybe God was giving us a little taste of real life that day—a lesson in marriage. Some seasons will feel like an indoor pool and a hot tub. Cedar-scented wood and towering fireplaces. And some seasons will feel like you’re pushing a boat up a dry riverbed. You want to move forward, but life makes it so hard.
I’m grateful to say we’ve had more of the former than the latter. But always in the harder seasons, there’s the hope of better days coming.
Thank you, Kevin, for always keeping us afloat and moving us along toward where we’re supposed to be.
Written with love – – – – Patti XOXO
“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.
Your people will be my people and your God my God.”
Ruth 1:16