Love... Is Not Shaken

Apparently, while I was busy polishing up my last post, my grandma fell in their kitchen. She is mostly okay, although rather sore. In the aftermath, she has decided it's time to take a break from exercise class for the rest of the winter. As grandma told me, it isn't easy getting old.

While all their children are pitching in to help with meals, laundry, and appointments, her constant on-site caregiver is my grandpa. From helping her get her socks on to swapping recliners so she can rest more comfortably to cooking her oatmeal for breakfast, his mission is to take care of her. He does everything he can, without complaining about any of it.

My grandparents have had a good many Valentine's Days together, and I'm sure some of them included going out for dinner or attending a show. Not this year. This year they will be home, but they will be home together. In the end, it's being together that counts the most. What romance looks like will change over the course of a long marriage as bodies change and grow old. Hopefully what will remain is our love for the person God has provided in His wisdom and goodness to romance our days on earth. Even when our hands and legs shake with age, may our hearts remain steadfast.

____________________________

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

--William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116