We were broke when we married. Lots of schooling and not much training. I dropped out of college and took a dead end job, she stayed in school. If that job hadn't come with so much overtime, we wouldn't have made it. We scrounged dimes to rent a VHS movie and we would walk to save the gas. We donated blood as a date (Mama's idea) because, hey, free cookies.
Trips to the grocery store in that state of affairs are nerve-wracking. Bread, milk, eggs, a bit of ham for sandwiches, not much more. We ate a lot of pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches. I was turned away from donating blood once for being anemic. But, as Tevya says about Motel and Tzeitel at the end of Fiddler on the Roof, "They are so happy, they don't know how miserable they are."
Our first weekend at home after our honeymoon, I made waffles for breakfast. I don't remember how it started, but I threw a waffle at my bride. She probably dared me to do it. It turned into a ridiculous game of trying to catch each other off guard with a flying waffle, or to get it down the other's shirt. We ran around laughing ourselves silly. That first place we lived was a dank little hole, but our memories from there are of mostly good times.
Money or no money, newly married is newly married. We had no television, no internet, just a library card and each other. We're still happy together, though we have more things. If we aren't getting along, I can always throw a waffle at her and we remember when we only had each other and it was enough. It still is.
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