A Moment to Mark

“We need proof you’re married,” the man at the social security office says.

So my husband and I walk two blocks down Main Street to the Madison County Courthouse to get that proof.

On the day before our wedding, nearly fifty years ago, we had come to this courthouse. That day, we climbed the stairs under the skylight and entered the Probate Court office to apply for our marriage license.

They asked us some questions—whether we were habitual drunkards, whether we were imbeciles, insane, or under the influence of liquor or narcotic drugs, and whether we were of nearer kin than second cousins. We affirmed that none of this was true and signed on the dotted line.

Today, the clerk brings a leather-bound record book to the counter. She pages through the years to 1975. And there it is—the very paper we signed.

“Look at the occupations we listed,” my husband says.

He’s a beekeeper; I’m a licensed practical nurse.

How our lives have changed. On that pre-wedding day, neither of us dreamed that fifty years later, we’d be living, not in Michigan, but in Ohio, two blocks from the courthouse. Or that we would have retired from decades of teaching and counseling and church work.

Proof of our marriage in hand, we walk home through the chill of a clear, spring day in the small town that’s been our home for 45 years. It’s an ordinary day. But it’s also a moment to mark.

We’re seventy years old and applying for social security. We’re grayed, a little creakier, somewhat slower. We always knew this aging would happen. But we’re a bit surprised at how fast it’s come.

And we have now what we hoped for back then—a love that’s grown stronger, deepened by decades of shared experiences, many wonderful, some hard.

It seemed a bit ludicrous, after all these years, to prove our marriage.

But as it turns out, the man from social security gave us more than an errand. He gave us a gift—the chance to look back and remember.