Surviving Tragedy

We finally got into bed and turned out the lights. As usual we went to sleep in each other's arms. What a wonderful sleep.

In the morning I made breakfast. We discussed the next step in our relationship. Both of us decided to call our parents and tell them what we had decided.

We called her parents first. Once we were connected I picked up our second phone so that I was on the line as well.

"Hi Daddy, we are calling to share some very good news. Jim proposed to me last night, and I said yes."

"Wonderful Rose! Let me put your mother on so that you can tell her."

Well, the phone call lasted the better part of half an hour. We discussed how long propriety would dictate we should wait before marrying. Her parents felt that since we had known each other for so many years that we could marry as soon as we wanted. The call to my parents went the same way.

Our next call was to our pastor. When we told him our intentions he came back with a friendly, "It's about time. You too have obviously been in love for many months now." We married two weeks later.

"I have a suggestion for a delayed honeymoon Rose."

"Why delayed?"

"Because it will take us a while to get everything ready. The other part of my idea is that we won't ever come back here after the honeymoon."

"Huh? Please tell me what you mean."

"Well, as long as we live in either your house or my house we will always be reminded of our great loss, as we remember the good times that we had with our first families. I thought that we could both sell our houses and move into a larger one that I've been looking at. We could move all our stuff into the new house and call our living there the honeymoon. What do you think?"

"That sounds great. When do I get to see the other house?"

"How about now?"

She quickly hugged and kissed me and then reached for her purse. We got to the car and drove the ten miles to the house I had in mind.

"Oh, this is beautiful. I didn't even know that this house was here. I've seen the driveway many times, but had no idea that there was a house back in here. Can we go inside and look?"

"Yup, I borrowed a key from the real-estate office."

We went to the front door and I opened it. She was stunned when she saw the entryway. The house had beautiful hardwood floors. On the left wall was a staircase that had a landing half way up the wall. The ceiling in the entryway went all the way to the peak of the house. Hanging down in the middle of the entry way was a beautiful chandelier. To the right, just off the entryway there was a wonderful living room complete with fireplace, two window seats, and built in book shelves that filled two walls. To the rear of the living room was a door that opened into a formal dining room which was directly attached to the kitchen. By the time she finished looking at the house her question was the obvious one.

"How soon could we move in?"

"Well, I took a bit of a gamble and put down ten thousand dollars earnest money. My offer to buy is based upon the selling of our two homes. The timing is entirely up to you. If you don't truly like this place, I can back out of the deal. I've already made arrangements with the broker that I have two days to back out and not lose the earnest money. What would you like to do about the house?"

She wanted the house.

That was ten years ago. In effect, we are still on our honeymoon. Our love has grown stronger than either of us could have believed. We now have a pair of fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. Our sex life has never been better, and my business grew to the point where I now have thirty engineers working for me. We still do analyses for large companies but we are also an "idea mill". That is, companies will approach us with a problem regarding a product that they want, and we do the fundamental work to provide the basic design of the product. We not only get paid for our work, we also have a 5% royalty on anything built from the patents we have produced for our clients. We thank God for the way our tragedy has worked out.