The Lima News, July 11 1950

Next to an ad for $9.95 wedding bands
$1 knit gowns
and stories of rehashed journalism:

(Battery plant workers on strike
Eskimo troops to guard Alaska
Speedy trials await North Koreans who murdered Yanks

--if captured --)

the headline is small
unassuming

impersonal

Wife of College Professor Drowns.

"Mrs. Harriet Steele, 40, wife of a Wilmington College professor, drowned yesterday while swimming in Lake Cowan, five miles south of Wilmington..."

Just another mid-summer day,
when a late afternoon swim
turned dark

and Harriet swam out too far, exhausted,
went under

and didn't come back up.

38 years later, her husband followed,
less tragic, more pedestrian,
more alone.

Nothing is said

of years spent apart,
expressions of love in cursive French
promises of things to come
in letter upon letter

of jealousy
and hope

of a home,
where the yellowing pages of 20-something love
would sit in the back of a closet,

eventually sold somewhere in Chicago
mislabeled, cast aside,
with a wedding dress

and a lifetime of waiting
broken by 15 precious years
that must have gone
too fast

like

Harriet.