Marriage: Handle With CareSample

It started out with a YouTube video. 

A woman was turning a watermelon into a cake, covering the chilled fruit with a skin of icing.

I said, “There’s watermelon in the garden.”

My husband, Randy, said, “They’re probably not ripe.”

We got up anyway and put on our shoes. Randy used the light on his phone to guide us across the wet yard, but it was barely necessary: the stars were so clear, they shone like beacons.

In the garden, we worked our way around the sprawling vines and selected the largest North Carolina. My husband twisted it off the vine and then dropped it. The fruit tumbled downhill, and we laughed like teenagers.

He gathered the watermelon again, and we trudged back up to the farmhouse. Everything dark and silent, our girls asleep.

We kicked off our muddy shoes at the door and walked into the kitchen. Randy withdrew a knife from the stand and sank it into the rind. It didn’t split with a satisfying pop.

Instead, the watermelon gradually broke open, and we could see the soft pink flesh stippled with black seeds. We smiled as the sticky juice covered the countertop. I took half of the watermelon and used a spoon to eat the heart. He took a spoon and ate the heart out of his.

It wasn’t ripe. It was barely even sweet. We didn’t care. The magic wasn’t in the acquiring but in that moment. Each second was a gift that had almost been stolen from us, and from our girls, because of my husband’s emergency brain surgery, so we cherished its sacred restoration.

My husband and I wiped the juice from our mouths, and I gathered the watermelon pieces and stacked them against my chest. I put on my shoes again, crossed the yard, and walked down to the chicken coop.

Opening the gate, I set the watermelon in the run, a treat for my ornery chickens in the morning. And then I walked back up to the darkened farmhouse, where my two young daughters were sleeping and my husband would sleep soon, next to me.

My eyes brimmed with gratitude, and I prayed that I would hold each moment in my hands and in my heart, always remembering that each second is a gift, pouring through the hourglass of this blessed, fleeting life.

Conversation Starter: Have you and your spouse ever walked through a trial? How did you find your way back to each other again when it was over? Did you feel like he/she had changed?

Getting Started: Sit on the couch and look through your wedding photos together or watch the video from your ceremony. If feeling especially adventurous, rewrite your vows while including the highlights—and lowlights—you have experienced in your years together. (“For colicky babies and sleepless nights, etc.”)