The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

 

When we got married, the mizzus and me, I was 32 years old and Karen was 30, a child bride. We lived in a shack down here where we live now, on the South End, and we were poor as churchmice. We went back to Wisconsin where we’d originally met in 1973 to get married in her parents’ house in Oshkosh. She wore a white wedding dress and I rented a tuxedo. It was all on the up and up, I guess.

When we said our I Do’s after the sickness and health, death do us part stuff, I put the ring Karen wanted on her finger. It wasn’t much, but you know and I do too, it wasn’t important. She never did get an engagement ring, no diamond, nothing. She asked me at the time if I wasn’t going to get a wedding ring too and I said no. I don’t much like the idea of a ring getting caught in some piece of machinery and taking a finger or a hand off. At least that’s what I said.

You married folks, you probably think it had something to do with me slipping the bonds of matrimony or something similar. Maybe want to keep my options open when I meet someone new, no point ruining my chances with a wedding ring closing romantic doors. And I will confess there have been some times when not having a ring led to some misunderstandings. Misunderstandings can be resolved, though.

Instead of a ring I planted a little tree, a seedling just sprouted. A few years later we moved it from the front of the shack back toward the woods where it would have more room to grow. It was about a foot and a half tall and we planted it below where the new house would be when we built it and next to the old glass studio where I used to work most days back then. That was 30 years ago or so. I was looking out the back window this morning at it. It’s now close to 100 feet tall and covers up the barn in the field to the north I put that window in just to look at. Being a sequoia, it grows fast.

Someone asked me a few years back if I thought I would live long enough to see it get big. I guess I look at that tree as a symbol, really, because I said, I do. My sequoia is growing every year. Like it will til death do us part. Show me a ring that can do that and I’ll wear it too.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2015 at 3:39 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.