Snow Going Back

Chapter 32

THIRTY-TWO

4 August 1955

It finally happened. W asked me to marry him. The sad part is that the proposal was the sweetest proposal there could ever have been. He took me out on a boat to the little island in the middle of the lake for the afternoon. We took sandwiches and lemonade, and the weather was truly beautiful. We’d had a lovely time, talking and laughing together, but then he got down on one knee and everything changed. He talked of my beauty and grace, and about how my smile lights up his day. He declared that he wants to take care of me, make me happy every day for the rest of my days. Then he told me, in that quiet way of his, that he knows I don’t love him the way he loves me, but that he’s OK with that. Because he knows I love him enough, and that I will grow to love him more once we are married and he has earned it.

That broke my heart, because that man is one of the kindest souls I know, and he shouldn’t have to earn anybody’s love. He already deserves it. And for one fleeting moment, those words made me feel a flutter of something more. They truly did. But that fleeting moment passed, a mere drop in the wide ocean of tides that wash over my heart every day for M. If I’d never met M, I imagine I’d be happy with W. But I did, and I can’t change that any more than I can stop the sun rising in the sky.

Mother spoke with me long into the night, begging me to make the right choice. She has never admitted it out loud, but I know that she knows about M. I suspected a while back, but now I am sure. She told me stories of hardship she endured when she first married my father. She told me how they stripped the shine off of their love for one another. And whilst I can’t imagine anything so unimportant as hardships ruining what M and I share, I must imagine that she also didn’t believe that at the time. Which does give me some cause for hesitation. The rest of my life is a very long time. And as all mothers like to say, those married in haste repent at leisure.

I stand at this momentous fork in the road not knowing what I should do. Do I trust my wild heart, or is it the fickle creature of so many women’s tales, which will turn like the tide at the first storm? Or if I trust sense and logic, is it sure to bring me contentment down the line, or will I feel unfulfilled with a husband who’ll grow to resent me when he realises he will never be enough?

How, in the name of all that is holy, am I supposed to choose?