25 Jan 2015 Forever promises

by Vivian Lawson Hogue

Romance has always existed by way of various traditions, purposes and behaviors. History shows that marriages were sometimes arranged with little or no romancing. However, love often developed regardless. The reality of marriages of the past, particularly up through the early 1900s, was predominantly one of mutual commitment regardless of hard lives. With the not uncommon death of a wife in childbirth, a father with several children and possibly a newborn would find it necessary to marry again and perhaps again. 

Weddings were seldom grand, and services were Biblical. Married life was teamwork, but every family has a humorous story that is still told. For instance, my maternal grandparents were married at 8:30 a.m. Feb. 9, 1899, at her parents’ rural home. The preacher had come one day too soon for the wedding, so he returned on that day. The couple’s courtship had been kept secret from the bride’s parents. Feb. 8 was hog-killing day and the preacher’s mistaken early arrival caused the bride’s father to summon six daughters to ask which had planned to marry, and the bride admitted it was she.     

Following the nuptials, the new couple left immediately for a town 20 miles away to buy furniture for their new home. It was 15 degrees below zero, the coldest then and since for that area of Arkansas. Rivers were frozen and loaded wagons didn’t break through. Their team of mules wore ice shoes for traction, and the couple had heated rocks to set their feet on. When they reached their destination, they found their hotel quarantined by a measles outbreak. They returned home and spent their first night in an unheated log home belonging to family friends. Their own “home” was one large log room. Their first child, a son, was born there but only lived 19 days. The father and a friend took the casket nine miles by horseback for burial beside his great-grandmother.

About 1900, they bought some hill land and built a two-room house. Before the cistern interior was plastered, a rooster fell into it. My grandmother lowered my grandfather into the open space in a dirt-removing bucket, but wasn’t strong enough to bring him and the rooster out. Neighbors became rescuers.

My grandfather made carved wood jewelry to show his affection for grandmother. My own father was a romantic during his and my mother’s courtship and continued special gestures during their 66 years together. Each spring he would pick the first jonquil blooms and set them at her place on the breakfast table. When she died in February 1992, he asked me to look for some on the morning of her funeral. It was early for their bloom time, but on this day there were three plants showing off their new sun-yellow ruffled bonnets. As my father approached my mother’s casket, he leaned over and placed the blossoms on her hands. 

When he published his first book, he scrawled inside the cover of her copy, “To my beloved partner who held up her end of the doubletree.” In his hill language, this referred to a crossbar that connects two horses to a wagon so they will work together toward one purpose. In due time, their vows, “till death do us part,” were completed in the ninth decade of their lives. They had observed every single promise — for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish forever, according to God’s Holy Ordinance. And when they said, “I do,” they could proudly say at life’s end . . . “I did.”