A Matched Pair

I frown into the mirror. What happened? Yesterday, we were newlyweds.” "Fifty years ago," he says. “You lost half a century.” There's my husband, slouching in the recliner, thinning hair, frayed collar, expanding stomach. A slow smile spreads across my face. I sidle over, plop into his lap, and sling my arm around his neck. "Remember Great Falls, fishing in the Missouri River until sunset, A & W root beer in frozen mugs? “How about that May snowstorm in Yellowstone, or camping in Canada, our sleeping bags zipped together as one? Or Holder Lake, Bird Woman Falls, and fishing in a stream no wider than this chair we’re sitting in? “Remember our two parakeets, perched above everything we owned in that forty-nine Chevy coupe on the trip home to Missouri? Or the car, stop-dead in Roundup, Montana, leaving us stranded for three days, waiting for parts? “”I remember that sexy redhead,” he says. “What happened to her?” “Not sure, but I think she ran off with a pot-bellied old man.”