Happy Anniversary!

Today is my parents' 60th wedding anniversary. They asked me to take their pictures last week and this is the one they chose to enlarge:

Yesterday we had a little surprise potluck picnic/party for them. I made four different strombolis: my favorite - ham and swiss (especially yummy served with Litehouse honey mustard salad dressing); pepperoni pizza; reuben; and a mediterranean one with lots of garlic, feta cheese, and sundried tomatoes. Yum!

I also made Marilyn's Flavored Waters with oranges and strawberries. It is my favorite drink to make. It is especially refreshing on a hot summer day.

It's hard to believe that my parents have been together for 60 years. That is a very long time. They haven't always gotten along very well, but somehow, they've made it work. Since this is the closest I come to writing in a journal these days, I hope you don't mind if I relate a little of their history here.

By today's standards they were young when they married, Dad was 21 and Mom was 18 and barely out of high school. My grandpa wasn't too happy about my mom marrying my dad and told her that if she wouldn't marry him, that he would pay for her to go to college. My mom was the baby in the family and her parents had not paid for any of their children to go to college. My mom chose to marry dad instead of going to college, and as their hometown was flooded, they went to Coeur d'Alene to get married. Only my mom's sister and her husband attended the wedding.

After being married in a reverend's parlor, they took the Greyhound bus into Spokane to stay at a hotel. When they went to pick up their luggage, they found that it had not made it onto the bus. Lucky for them, it arrived on the next bus a couple of hours later.

After their hotel stay, they moved into a small apartment in Spokane. I'm not sure how many apartments were in the building, but they all shared two bathrooms, a men's and a women's. My mom said you had to scrub the tub every time you wanted to take a bath. The apartment building also happened to be right next to a whorehouse. I'm sure that made for some interesting neighbors.

They eventually moved somewhere else in Spokane. The winter of 1949-1950 was the hardest known in Spokane up to that point. Many were laid off from their jobs, including my dad. My mom gave birth to my sister on December 15th. By the end of January, my dad put Mom and my sister on a train on the old SI Railroad (Spokane International Railroad) back home to her parents' home. When they arrived in Bonners Ferry, they stayed with friends in town for a couple of nights until word reached her parents to come pick them up. My dad packed up and drove back to Bonners Ferry later. They lived with her parents for a few months, during which my dad built my grandma some beautiful new cabinets.

They then left for Portland, Oregon, where my dad went to diesel repair school during the day, and worked at a cannery at night. Eventually they returned to Bonners Ferry, Idaho where they raised their family and lived until 1997, when they moved to Utah to be close to their grandchildren.