A Love Story

It seems that this spring in Boston has been an almost endless chain of gray/wet/cool days. There were two days of almost 100 degree sunshine two weeks ago, and then right back to this damp. Today's offering is an attempt to lighten your mood.

From Delia Ephron in The New York Times, comes this essay about grief and late-in-life love and illness and taking chances. Enjoy.

After 54 Years, We Fell in Love . After Five Months, I Got Leukemia .
I thought it was a romantic comedy. I was wrong about the comedy.
By DELIA EPHRON

I thought I’d fallen into my own romantic comedy.
I write them for a living. My sister Nora and I wrote “You’ve Got Mail,” among others. How people fall in love is my specialty.
Here is where it begins.
Last August I wrote an essay for this newspaper about trying to disconnect my late husband’s phone and ending up in Verizon hell. In October, I got an email from a man who read the piece. A man Nora had fixed me up with when I was 18 years old, a summer intern she’d met at Newsweek. We’d had three dates, he wrote.
Now we were 72 years old. We are talking 54 years ago. “We went to a Columbia football game. There were snow flurries,” Peter told me when I confessed in my return email to having absolutely no memory of our dates.
He was now a psychiatrist, a Jungian analyst, living in the Bay Area.
There were confluences. He’d had similar problems — with AT&T — trying to disconnect his wife’s line after she died. The last trip they took together had been to Syracuse, Sicily. My most recent novel, “Siracusa,” was set there. Peter loved it, he told me. He knew the way to a writer’s heart.
“Do you want to talk further?” he wrote. “Clearly I do.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/delia-ephron-love-leukemia.html?ref=opinion