I’m Margaret Briggs. I’m seventy-one.
And at precisely 6:18 one October Thursday evening, over dinner in Scottsdale, Arizona, my only son looked past the roast chicken I’d prepared and asked me when I was finally going to leave.
On a porch.
With a cup of tea.
Harold and I shared forty-four years of marriage.
We met at a church picnic in Flagstaff in 1979. He was twenty-six. I was twenty-five. He was a high school shop teacher with sawdust in his hair and a laugh you could hear across a parking lot. I was a bookkeeper at a lumber company. He came for student lumber, then spent an hour debating prices with me.
He asked me to dinner. I said no.
He came back the next week for more two-by-fours he didn’t need.
I said yes.
We moved to Tucson in 1984. Harold got a job teaching woodshop at Catalina High School. I took a job handling the books for a plumbing company.
We bought a little house on East Linden Street. Two bedrooms. A carport. A front porch with a ceiling fan that wobbled.
It cost fifty-eight thousand dollars.
It was home for thirty-eight years.
I painted the kitchen yellow during our first week.
Harold said it looked like the inside of a lemon. I said that was the point. He painted the cabinets matching white. He built a breakfast nook by the window from oak salvaged from a Bisbee church. He carved our initials into the underside of the table hidden from view.
H.B. + M.B. 1984.
I planted roses along the front walk. Six bushes. Mister Lincoln. Double Delight. Peace. Harold teased me that roses don’t belong in the desert. Every morning at six, before the heat, I watered them.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
