Years Gone By

As we were going through more boxes today, trying to clean out the garage so that we can move BOTH Escapes into it, we found some treasures.

I wasn't expected to find anything I wanted to keep.  After all some of those boxes had been in there for over a year, moved from either the house in Pulaski when we were cleaning it out, or moved from Wooster by way of Pulaski when we cleaned out Mom and Dad's house.

My feeling was that if I hadn't needed it or wanted it or missed it by now, I didn't need it or want it or...whatever.

Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.

In one of the boxes, well actually in more than one box but that is not relevant right now, I found pictures.  This one stunned me.

It was my senior picture, my picture for graduation from Mt. Vernon High School in 1969. 

There were two copies of this, each one if a flimsy plastic frame.  I am not sure where they came from or why they were in a box in the garage, but there they were!  '

I remember so well my senior picture session.  It was so different than what Hilary does today for photo shoots.  I had a sweater and the requisite strand of pearls.  I didn't fuss with my hair well and I had no idea how to style it.  Since I had no older sisters or older cousins to help me and since Mom didn't offer any assistance, I asked if I could go to the beauty shop and have it styled there.  Surprisingly, Mom agreed.  Maybe she was afraid that my pictures would be embarrassing to her if they were horrible and she had to send them to relatives.  Anyway, my hair was not an issue.  And I thought it looked nice, considering the hairstyles of other girls in my class.

The other picture I found was of this guy.  He was a senior the year before me, at a school I had never heard of at the time I was in high school.

Isn't he handsome?    Today he said he didn't like the picture and that it didn't look like him. I think it does, for the most part.  If one looks closely at both of the pictures, the added coloring and editing is really obvious.  But once again---that was how it was done then.

I often wonder what it would have been like if we had been students at the same school.  Would we have noticed each other?  Would the attraction have been there?  Would he have taken me to the prom?

I know he was so focused on basketball that he said he didn't really want to date anyone.  I did want to have a boyfriend and someone to take me to the prom at least, but I was so shy and afraid of anyone liking me and Mom making a big deal out of it, that I stayed away from the boys when I was in school.

No...I think it was part of God's plan for me to go to Indiana State and receive my degree, then secure a teaching job at West Central.  I think it was part of God's plan for Gary to go to Purdue, then into the National Guard, then to farm with his dad.  I think it was part of God's plan for me to become a 4-H leader in Medaryville with Jim Henderson, who introduced me to Gary on a Livestock Tour where we traveled around to the members' farms to check out their 4-H pigs and cattle and sheep.

I think that when we met and how our romance developed was the way it was supposed to be.

But I still wonder what might have happened if the girl in that senior picture had met the boy in that senior picture a few years earlier when they were still in high school.

A lot of years have gone by.  A year of courtship.  Forty-three years of marriage.  Two daughters.  Two sons-in-law.  Five grandchildren.

All because those two people fell in love.