Dinner for Two by Sharon Farmer from Sun City, Arizona
I stood in the kitchen, preparing a dinner of meatloaf and loaded baked potatoes for my husband, Nick, and me. I’d loved cooking ever since I took home the Crisco Home Economics award in high school and had enjoyed making hearty meals throughout 50 years of marriage. Well, almost 50 years. Our wedding anniversary was coming up, just a few days after Valentine’s Day. I’d been excited to plan a delicious meal for our romantic evening, but now I wasn’t even feeling the joy of cooking a meatloaf.
A few days before, I’d seen a talk show segment about calculating how many dinners one had made. After subtracting the weekly night Nick cooked, takeout meals and dinners out, I had my number: 17,000! The number left me feeling exhausted and not in the mindset to be in the kitchen.
The oven timer dinged, and I tested the meatloaf. It was saltier than I liked. I sighed and turned to prepare the condiments for the loaded baked potatoes. I opened the new carton of sour cream and stopped. There on the top of the cream was a perfectly raised heart. Or was it the shape of angel wings?
I returned to cooking with renewed energy. And sure enough, Nick proclaimed that meatloaf one of my best. Just wait till he tasted the anniversary dinner I had in mind for us valentines. My angel sous-chef and I had big plans.
Why I Love Mondays by Pat LoPresti from Summerville, South Carolina
I walked into Trident Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina, where I’d volunteered every Thursday for the past 15 years. We’d been furloughed because of the pandemic, but today the hospital welcomed all us volunteers back with a party. It was so good to see familiar faces as well as the people who’d worked on other days.
I met a man named Ron, who took a shift on Wednesdays after his wife passed away. I’d lost my husband of 56 years, so I understood Ron’s pain. With all the volunteers returning, the hospital created new schedules. Ron and I both got assigned to Mondays—Ron in the morning and me in the afternoon—so we shared lunch between our shifts. One afternoon, Ron asked for my phone number. He took me to one of the nicest restaurants in town.
Is this a date? I wondered.
At the end of the evening, both of us shy, we shook hands at my front door. I went inside, thinking dinner was a one-time gift. But Ron called again, and we started spending much more time together outside of those Monday lunches.
Eventually we traveled, checking off destinations from both our bucket lists. When Ron proposed, the hospital threw another party—this one on Valentine’s Day, to celebrate us finding each other. A lot of people complain about Mondays, but for Ron and me, it’s the best day of the week.
Definitely Dreamy by Jennifer Wilder from Mableton, Georgia
My dream had seemed so real: A young, handsome man sat at the foot of my bed surrounded by gifts wrapped in bright paper with fuchsia ribbons—gifts for me. He looked very familiar, but I couldn’t place him. “Who are you?” I asked. He stood up and hugged me, and I woke up.
I’d prayed for help getting over my ex-boyfriend. At 34, I feared I’d be single forever. Did the man in the dream mean something? Over the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I was sure I knew him somehow. Slowly, my mental picture of him became more detailed. Then it hit me. Nathan. I was friends with his cousins in high school. I’d had such a crush on him back then! But I couldn’t even remember his last name. I racked my brain. Finally, it came to me—Wilder.
I searched on Facebook. No luck, but I did find his cousin Kim and sent a message to reconnect. “It’s been so long!” she responded. “Why don’t we have lunch?”
Guess who she brought along? Her cousin, Nathan, who was blessedly single. We hit it off, and four years later, the last name I took so long to remember became mine.
The Doctor Is In…by Kaylin Kaupish, Editor
William Stewart Halsted, M.D., a late-nineteenth-century American surgeon, is often called the Father of Modern Surgery. Known for his strict adherence to sterile conditions, Halsted introduced the practice of wearing surgical gloves in the operating room as a way to stop the spread of germs that could cause infections.
But that wasn’t the good doctor’s goal initially. His scrub nurse, Caroline Hampton, had suffered a painful skin reaction to the caustic disinfectants he demanded be used before entering his operating room. Halsted wrote about this in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “In the winter of 1889…the nurse in charge of my operating room complained that the solutions of mercuric chloride produced a dermatitis of her arms and hands. As she was an unusually efficient woman, I gave the matter my consideration….”
When the nurse said she might have to quit due to her sensitive skin, Halsted leaped into action. He made a plaster cast of her hands and had the Goodyear Rubber Company create thin, arm-length rubber gloves to fit. Halsted’s invention successfully met his nurse’s needs and more. The wearing of gloves was adopted by other nurses and assistants in the operating room, and eventually by the surgeons themselves. A medical breakthrough.
Yet there may have been something else inspiring Halsted to deeply consider his nurse’s dermatitis. You see, the two married in 1890. Perhaps the world was forever changed by a man in love.
Wedding Bells and Flutes by Mary Neese from Evansville, Indiana
Chuck and I were getting married in a few days, and I’d seen a lot of wedding gift deliveries. But one—with a return address I didn’t recognize—came with instructions on top: “Please open BEFORE wedding day.”
I waited for Chuck so we could open the gift together. Inside was a letter. “We kindly wish that you accept these champagne glasses that once belonged to our late parents, Chuck and Mary Felker of La Crosse, Wisconsin, married for 62 years.” The two delicate flutes were engraved with the words, “Let me dance with you forever, Mary & Chuck.”
The Felkers’ seven adult children—Marcia, Mark, Mike, Marion, Monica, Marty and Meg—had found our wedding registry through an online search. They’d wanted to honor their parents by sending the glasses to an engaged couple who shared their parents’ first names. The Felker kids hoped we would be blessed with many years of happiness, much like the flutes’ previous owners.
I reached out to Meg Felker on Facebook to thank her and invite all seven Felkers to the wedding. They couldn’t make it, but I sent photos of us toasting with the glasses to a legacy of love.
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