My knees near gave, because inside the base of that ten-dollar coffee pot was a photograph I had never seen in thirty-four years, the two of us at a lake as young sweethearts, and behind it a letter, and the photograph stopped my heart because I remembered that exact day.
I sat down at the table and looked at us, young and laughing at the water we would spend our whole marriage loving.
It was our very first date, the day I took Nadine fishing at that lake and she out-caught me three to one and never once let me forget it. Someone had snapped our picture, and she had kept it hidden all these years, and now she had left it for me with a letter.
She wrote that the whole reason she teased me about the boat and the trolling motor all these years was that the water was where we began, and she wanted our anniversary gift to bring us back to that first day at the lake, the day she knew she would marry me.
She had written: You keep going on about that trolling motor like the boat is about fish. It is not. It never was. It is about us, and that first day at the lake, and how you looked at me when I caught the big one. I bought you this pot to make you grumble, and hid this picture to make you cry, and I wanted to sit on our new porch swing and give you both and watch your face. I love you, you old grump. Since that first day at the lake.
I had bought her the porch swing for that anniversary. She never got to sit in it. And she had made me a gift that pointed us both straight back to the beginning, and I had shoved it in the pantry.
I put the photograph in a frame. I hung the porch swing myself, the one I bought her, and I set that framed picture of our first date on the little table beside it.
Now every evening I sit on the swing I bought my wife, and I look at the two of us young at the lake, and I remember the day a girl out-fished me and stole my heart in the same afternoon.
I bought the trolling motor too. Because she was right, the way she was always right. The boat was never about fish. It was about us. I take our first-date photograph out on the water with me, and I fish the way we did that first day, and I can almost hear her laughing when I miss one.
The cheapest-looking gift she ever gave me carried our whole beginning inside it. Thirty-four years, and she still knew exactly how to bring me home to the day I fell in love. I make my coffee in that dented pot every morning now, and I thank her for the lake, and the years, and for loving an old grump from the very first cast.