A Valentine’s Day Poem: Love That Blossomed In A Cotton Patch
It’s Valentine’s Day weekend and many are celebrating love. After many, many years of singleness, I am now celebrating my 6th year with my forever valentine. We met through an online dating site in August 2016, an easy way to meet people in our busy and high tech lives. There was a time, though, that lovers didn’t have the internet and internet dating sites to meet people. The internet has made a lot of things much easier, but times used to be much simpler. In a small town in rural Alabama in the 1940s, two young people had to find love in simpler, low-tech ways.
A 45th Anniversary
My paternal grandparents, who were married 54 years when my grandfather, my PawPaw, died in 1998, were just such two young lovers. When we celebrated their 45th wedding anniversary, my dad wrote a poem for them based on their love story. He wrote a lot of poetry. After his passing in 2006, I became the trustee of those poems. Like my grandparents, I miss him dearly. As I re-read this poem he wrote to honor his parents on their 45th wedding anniversary, I can still see and hear him reading it to them in front of all of the guests to their party held inside a community center in Rabun, Alabama, complete with the fixings for the wedding reception they never had.
Marriage Is Not About the Wedding
Today, I read on a social media post about someone trying to buy a wedding cake for under $800 to feed 200 people. To each her own, if you want to have 200 people at your wedding or spend many thousands of dollars, that’s you. But, it made me think back to my grandparents. My grandparents were poor when they met and never did have much financial wealth. They didn’t exchange rings when they married and they definitely didn’t have a big wedding cake, groom’s cake, or any of the other trappings we associate with wedding receptions now. Yet, their marriage lasted 54 years, and would have lasted longer had my grandfather lived longer.
Marriage isn’t about the wedding or having a Valentine’s date every year, it’s about the love, commitment, and hard work between two people determined to journey through life together. Planning for a wedding is fun, but it’s the marriage that matters. The daily living with someone else, the good and the bad. Love, and making it endure, is hard work. (By hard work and making love endure, I’m not referencing physical abuse – if you’re being abused, get out now.)
The Hard Work of Making A Marriage Last
My grandmother got up every morning at 4 am to make buttermilk biscuits from scratch for my grandfather before he went to work. She raised their six kids, packed his lunch for him, and had dinner ready in the evenings. My grandfather worked blue collar jobs throughout his life to provide for the family, and in the evenings and on weekends worked and tended his gardens for food. He didn’t shower her with affection or constantly say “I love you”, something he definitely should have said to her more often, and I don’t know if he ever did anything for her for Valentines (likely not). Love was there in the steadiness and stability, in the daily caring for one another, and in the daily choosing each other. Their marriage stood the test of time and left a legacy: 54 years, 6 children, 11 grandchildren (one of whom is with them in heaven), and many great-grandchildren.
My grandparents, they understood hard work, and put that into their marriage. Their very beginnings were based in hard work, they met picking cotton.
Love That Blossomed In A Cotton Patch
Even though I wasn’t there to know the facts,
I understand it really began in a cotton patch.
Two young people were hired to pick cotton,
But evidences are they did more sparkin’.
The cotton fields were all white, and in the sun did glisten,
The cotton bolls were straining to listen.
Two young lovers were in their midst a walkin’
Hidden among the cotton plants these two were talkin’.
Picking cotton was hard on the back and hands,
But Jeff and Elouise were oblivious to the cotton’s demands.
While others were straining to fill their cotton sacks,
These two lovers were picking way, way back.
Picking a hundred pounds of cotton could take all day long,
But the two young lovers did it with a happy song.
While the others were working to make a dollar,
Jeff was thinking of taking Elouise to the altar.
The cotton patch romance grew stronger with time,
For on January 3rd 1944, Jeff married his beautiful valentine.
Things have not always been easy for the cotton patch lovers,
But their love for each other has kept them together.
From this cotton patch love affair six children has come their way,
Along with five grandchildren to brighten their days.
As we celebrate their forty fifth wedding day,
We the children and grandchildren just want to say,
We love you mom and dad and that is a fact,
We are all happy it started in a cotton patch.
~ W.J. Hallford, 1989
Happy Valentine’s Day
From the use of twenty-first century technology, thinking of much simpler times and simpler ways, Happy Valentine’s Day to you.