Fifty-eight years ago we were married at St. John's Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida. John had just turned 21; I was 20. We had been a couple since 1959 and high school.Ahead lay: a couple of years on a Marine Corps base; John on a tour of duty in Japan and Vicki back to Tampa where she taught at Berkeley Prep, John out of the Marines and getting his BA at University of South Florida; Vicki still teaching at Berkeley Prep and getting her MA at USF; a year of grad school for John in Iowa City; disillusionment with religious studies and a three-month motorcycle tour in Europe; return to Tampa area and building a small house on a lake in Odessa, Fla.; teaching in a new independent school (the hippie school, as some parents called it) in Tampa; birth of our first child; followed by a longing for land and dissatisfaction with Florida; a move to the mountain farm in 1975 . . . and, another son, two daughters-in-law, a granddaughter and numerous dogs and cats later, here we still are.I think of how young and strong we were back in 1963, and how the horizons seemed unlimited. And I remember a line from Tennyson's "Ulysses."Though much is taken, much remains . . .
Happy Anniversary and all my love to my co-conspirator and enabler.
