About a week ago, I was sitting on the front porch at my uncle's house. I had asked him about the old times, and if he could tell me what they were about. He looked down at me with a grin, and said, "Well Sissy Bug, you are in for the story of a lifetime." I leaned back in my old, wooden rocking chair thinking about how boring this might actually be. He pulled his tooth pick out of his mouth and stared at the ground for a second; then, he looked up at me and began his "story of a lifetime."
He began to talk about when he was younger and before he met his wife, Aunt Louise. Uncle Roy told me that his family was poor and "could hardly afford bread on the table." Uncle Roy had to get a job to help support the family because he was the oldest. He began working in the army, but even though he wasn't old enough to go into combat; they hired him to wash clothes and to be a gopher. Next to the army base, there was a small town school. My Uncle Roy didn't really know how to read and write, but he did know the basics. He then began to talk about "some little girls that had some funny strings in their hair," accidentally, I began to laugh at the thought of my uncle calling the beautiful ribbons, in a girls hair, strings.
Uncle Roy began to giggle some and I knew that he was about to get into the plot of the story. "Well, darlin," he looked back at the ground to see a tiny lizard crawl by,"you probably already know that I couldn't write to well, but we would write them little girls in that school yard by carving on some little old rocks, and then we'd toss them over the hurricane fence." I began to think about what he had done, and how creative they were. "Well," he said as he looked up at me still grinning,"some of my boys carved on a rock to one of them girls that I wanted to go on a date with her. Even though I really didn't she wrote back to them and told them to tell me to pick her up at 7 o'clock that evening."
Before Uncle Roy could finish telling me what he had to say, Aunt Louise walked out the screen door and greeted me. "Well, what you two doing out here." I told my aunt about my uncle's previous conversation with me, and her face got as red as an apple. I told her where we left off in our conversation, then she picked up. "Hun," she said gently,"Roy and I went on that date together, and we just talked and had the best time. We've been talking ever since." I asked her how many more dates they had went on before they decided the big wedding date, and she told me not many. I suppose they knew they were meant to be together.