“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.”
That was on a cold January day in the front parlor of a Justice of the Peace 45 years ago. She was 21, I would turn 30 some eight days later.
We immediately moved to a shack on 38 remote acres of Ohio woodland. A gift from my brother and commuting distance to Ohio University. Our closest neighbor was a half mile away, living and raising her brood in a Tepee.
On that birthday night, my brother generously offered to buy us a lobster dinner to celebrate. We were to meet in town. But Carla and I had never lived together before, so I learned my first lesson in “Carla time”. Things happen when all the stars align for her, but not until then. Our 7pm dinner became, 8, 9, …maybe tomorrow.
I crashed.
At 3am, she woke me up to present the birthday cake she made for me. No easy task with a broken-down antique wood stove that had been converted to propane. The tank outside leaned drunkenly up against the front stoop.
No pluming or running water.
More like a bread bowl with a liquid center than cake, but in the middle of the night, with my bride of eight days, that thing tasted like euphoria.
It was better than any lobster dinner could ever be.
I hadn’t been looking for Betty Crocker or a maid. Actually, I hadn’t been looking at all. But along came this girl. So quick and bright, totally out-of-the box, the author of long articulate letters back and forth before we married.
I was powerless.
In his song “Galway Girl”, Steve Earl asks: “what's a fella to do?
Because her hair was black and her eyes were blue”
It’s like that, only with Carla it was freckles on her knees and hair that smelled Ivory soap.
