Priest’s Confessions: Thirty Years and still going strong | Columnists | Summerville Journal Scene

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Priest’s Confessions: Thirty Years and still going strong

Published Tuesday, December 14, 2010 2:50 PM

By Ellen Priest
Summerville Journal Scene ®

photo provided

Ellen and Jeff Priest 30 years later in 2010

photo provided

Mr. and Mrs. Priest marry on December 19, 1980

It’s amazing how the years have gone by.

Thirty years ago this Sunday, I stood next to the love of my life and pledged my eternal love to him.

I planned on spending my life with him – a lofty goal when one is just 20 years old – and I have.

To say all the years have been easy would be a lie, but I also know I could not have committed my love to a better man.

A week before Christmas and with a temperature of 12 below zero and a wind-chill factor of 40 below, we got married in Connecticut, got in our car and drove to Florida to begin our lives together.

We had dated since I was 15, and we had lived in different states for three and a half of those five years. The year we married, we saw each other for a total of two weeks before our December marriage.

But we were in love.

I worked while he finished his master’s degree.

To say we were poor is an understatement. We lived in a garage apartment that was smaller than my living room is now, with no air conditioning, in South Florida, sharing our space with many unwanted pests.

Did I mention that we had no a/c when it was hot ALL the time?

When Jeff graduated, we packed up the car and drove to Illinois where he would complete his PhD.

Since he did his research on the habitat of coyotes, we lived in very rustic dwellings, shared with mice and brown-recluse spiders.

My job had me driving 60 miles to work each day for years.

During the week he finally graduated, I gave birth to our daughter.

And then it was back to Florida for a couple of years for his first real job before we moved to South Carolina.

In the 23 years since we landed in South Carolina, our son was born and I completed my college degree.

We also housed all the critters from the science education center at USC Aiken before there was a dwelling on campus to house them.

Once Jeff wrote the grant and the center was built, my house was finally free of the flying squirrels, squirrels, opossum, foxes, hissing cockroaches from Madagascar, bats, mice, rats, red tailed hawks, barred owls, barn owls, and screech owls; not to mention the 40 to 50 snakes.

Some still occasionally come to visit, but then they move on.

We’ve watched our daughter graduate from college with an accounting degree, move away from home, land a good job and buy her own home.

We’ve watched our son graduate from high school and enter college at USC as an enthusiastic music education major.

But mostly we’ve watched them grow into two mature, caring individuals of whom we couldn’t be more proud.

Over three years ago, when I took this job, we started living apart. I can honestly say the best part of almost every week is driving in the driveway after a two-hour commute on Friday evenings to see him.

He has a lot less hair and a few more wrinkles, but then, I have a few wrinkles myself.

We mostly stay in and cook, taking our time, unlike all those hurried dinners with young children and homework waiting to be done.

I sometimes miss having the young kids at home but then I remember what it was like, trying to get off work at a decent time, get them fed, and to the ball field, then hurrying home to get homework done before bedtime.

When we do go out, it’s often at odd times, like 4 or 5 in the afternoon, teasing each other about what good old folks we’re going to make.

We overheard a waitress recently say what a cute couple we were. We think she meant what a cute old couple we were.

And we are.

He has these oddities that are uniquely him.

When he coughs hard, he finishes with a sneeze.

When I ask him most anything, he says, “m, m, m.” Translate that into the sound you make when you mean, “I don’t know”.

Now, this is a man with three college degrees, including his doctorate. He finished second in his high school class and finished college in three years with a perfect GPA.

But he still says, “m, m, m,” when I ask him about anything.

When he does, I give him the look. You know, the look. The one that says you really do know the answer if you would just think hard enough about it. He loves “the look.” It makes him laugh.

We’re settled. And happily so.

It’s amazing to me that it all started when I had the wisdom to say yes to a date with him when I was a mere 15 years old.

I can’t remember life without him, to be honest, but then I don’t ever want to.

To tell you what type of man this is, when my mom needed new hearing aids a few years ago, I asked him about us paying for them again. I warned him that they were over $4,000 and we could not be sure how long she would be around to enjoy them at her advanced age. He replied that even if it allowed her a better quality of life for one day, it would be worth the money.

And when I wanted to adopt a terribly abused and scarred large dog a few years ago, the day before the shelter was going to euthanize him, he agreed, knowing full well he would be the one who would be his primary caregiver, along with our other three dogs.

And that is why my heart still skips a beat when I greet him every Friday night.

Happy 30th Anniversary, Hon!

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