This past December was the third Christmas under that rule.
It was also the first Christmas without Wendell.
My husband died fourteen months before. A heart attack. Out by the hay barn, in the cold, on a Tuesday in October.
He was gone before the ambulance from Harlow Fire even turned onto our road.
Forty-six years married.
I don’t say that number to make anybody feel sorry for me. I say it because it matters to what was inside that box.
Wendell wasn’t a man who talked much.
He fixed things. That’s what he did.
He fixed the church furnace twice without ever being asked. He fixed Brett’s truck every single time it broke down, until Brett was thirty-five years old and still calling his dad about it. He fixed my sewing machine and the neighbor’s lawn mower and the swing set at the elementary school.
And in our whole marriage, there was only one time he ever sat me down and told me a real story about himself.
It was about a cigar box.
He was fourteen years old when his father gave it to him.
An old wooden cigar box with a brass hinge. His father had smoked the cigars out of it one at a time, over ten years of Sunday dinners.
Wendell kept his lawn-mowing money in it.
Not in a bank. In that box. Under his bed. Because he didn’t trust banks yet. But he trusted that box.
He mowed eleven lawns a summer, for three summers. And he kept every single dollar of it in there, folded in half, until he had thirty-one dollars saved.
Back then, thirty-one dollars was not a small amount of money for a boy.
He used that thirty-one dollars, plus a little more he’d put by since, to buy my wedding ring.
Not the ring I wear now. That came later, when we could afford better.
The first one.
The one he slipped on my finger in his mother’s kitchen before he’d even properly asked my father. Because he was seventeen and I was sixteen, and we were both too impatient to do things in the right order.
He kept that box his whole life.
It sat on his dresser for forty-six years. Right next to his wallet and his reading glasses and his pocketknife.
He only told me the whole story of it once. All the way through, properly.
It was on our fortieth anniversary.
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