"Don't You Remember, You Told Me You Loved Me, Baby?"

Most people who know me know that my husband and I have been together since high school thus giving us the moniker of being “High School Sweethearts.” What a lot of people don’t know is that we actually broke up twice before we finally got married. The first time was while we were in high school during our senior year. And that can be attributed to being…well…being teenagers, where everything has meaning and yet love can be fleeting. The second time we broke up was a bit more profound.

We were engaged to be married. And while I’m choosing not to go into those details of breakup number two, trust me when I tell you how we finally ended up together makes for a better story. I think we’d been apart for three months and during that time not being with my then ex-fiancé was like having a void in my life. But how does one go about getting their one true love back? The answer is; leave it to Mother Nature!

Upstate New York, where we lived way back in 1970’s was in the midst of a typical mid-winter heavy snowfall. My mother and I were driving home in her gold Duster from Albany where she worked and I attended college. As the snow storm made travel nearly impossible we realized we had two choices for which road to travel home on, the high road or literally the low river road. As fate would have it, we decided on the latter, which would eventually leave us stranded at the bottom of a very long, windy hill along route 9-J. Now my mother adored my

ex-fiancé and she pretty much thought I was a crazy woman for leaving him. But as we sat there all alone on the dark road with the snow falling at hard rate, and nothing but time on our hands, (I may have been having visions of our frozen bodies being discovered in the early dawn hours by a snowplow driver), she quietly reminded me that Tom told me if I ever needed anything to call him. My mother was pretty sure that that night was a good time to take him up on his promise. So I “volunteered” to get out of the car, and trudge through the knee deep snow, down a long driveway to what turned out to be the house of a high school classmate whose mother graciously let me in so I could make the all-important, life altering phone call.

Tom graciously agreed to come out into the now massive storm to rescue the damsels in distress. I have to admit that when I saw the headlights of his brother’s Jeep coming towards us through the blinding snow, my heart began to race.  My mother eagerly moved to the back seat so our Knight in Shining Armor could take the wheel. His brother hooked a tow strap to my mother’s bumper and towed my mother’s car up the road. Now as all this was taking place Tom and I were in the front seat with the glow from the dashboard lights surrounding us. I laid my hand in the middle of the seat and within minutes I felt the heat of him as he covered his hand over mine, giving a reassuring squeeze. We both knew the gesture meant so much more than just “Hey, you’re safe now.” For us it was a new beginning.

As I looked across the expanse of the space that separated us, I knew we were getting back together. I remember saying, “I know we should remember the song playing on the radio right now for the rest of our lives.” He chuckled. And to this day the only thing I know about that night, is I’m forever thankful my mother and I chose the low road, and the song on the radio…well I can tell you it was a Carpenter’s song.