Falling in love is one of life’s miracles. Falling in love again is a double miracle. Finding the words to describe that feeling is not really possible, so let me just present the basic facts, which are pretty interesting in themselves.

Karla and I met in sixth grade when her parents moved to Borger, Texas. We graduated from Borger High School together in 1957 and we each married during our college years. In one of the funny coincidences of our lives, we each started our married lives, two years apart, in a little one-bedroom bungalow out behind 1204 Roberts Street in Borger. If you’re interested in that little sliver of Borger history it’s still standing out there on the alley behind 1204 Roberts, nearly sixty-five years later.

Karla and Art Bybee raised their family in Dumas, Texas, then moved back to Borger thirty-five years ago. They both retired from Philips Petroleum Company. Lynda Bonny and I raised our family all over creation. We had 52 different addresses in 62 years of marriage, primarily due to my two nomadic careers, the Air Force and heavy industrial construction. By the time I retired, we had moved back to Amarillo six times.

Karla lost Art, her husband of sixty-four years, and six months later I lost Lynda. Last summer we attended a Borger High School class reunion, neither with any idea of finding romance at our age. In fact, I didn’t detect any evidence at all of a budding romance at the reunion. It was two weeks later, on the Fourth of July, when my sister, Charlene, who still lives in Borger, went with a friend to the Dairy Queen after the fireworks. Karla was there at the Dairy Queen with a friend who was also a close friend of Charlene’s. The mutual friend (also a friend of mine, who drove back and forth with me to Lubbock when we were both at Texas Tech) introduced them. Karla, she said, was in the same graduating class as little brother Gary. They then discussed me, to the extent that Charlene felt moved to text me late at night about it. I am slow, but I’m not a complete idiot. I contacted Karla the next morning and by suppertime on July 5th we had established that we both knew what we wanted our lives to be like for the fifteen or twenty years we had left, and we wanted exactly the same things. We decided to meet in Oklahoma City, halfway between Borger and Northwest Arkansas, to see if each was the one the other was looking for. We were. After that, it was just a matter of getting all the details lined up.

The last of those details is this wedding, an opportunity to gather and mingle our two amazing families and some special friends. Karla and I are finding that that opportunity, to watch the bonding of our children, our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren, the merging into one big, special blended family, is the greatest blessing of all the blessings that followed our falling in love again.

Gifts?