Springtime again

BY STEVE JANOSKI

If I did not see it myself, I might have thought it straight off the cover of some generic Hallmark card: a middle-aged couple, sitting side by side together on a wooden park bench overlooking the wind-rippled waters, watching the geese waddle back and forth between bank and burn.

They’re tightly intertwined and make for a curious sight: he, gray-haired, adorned in a black suit jacket with a silver wristwatch that glares in the sun, sits with his arm around her shawl-clad shoulders. Her blonde hair washes over his sleeve.

She leans against him, dips her face closer to his, and they appear to speak in between small kisses, and I cannot help but think how unusual it is to see a couple so clearly in the middle of their lives who retrain that kind of affection for each other.

Often, it seems that those who have become too familiar with each other tend to let a callous apathy replace the fondness they once felt.

Not these two. They huddle close in the way that young couples with softer hearts do, before life’s tribulations cast their stony shadows.

I come to the conclusion that they’re probably not the typical long-married couple, and I wonder what their back story might be.

Maybe they are both divorced… or at least, one is divorced. Maybe the other is separated.

They met by way of a friend, maybe, or through a dating site that has put them on the path to being one of the infamous "online success stories" the commercials talk about. Now, they’re in those early stages of love that makes even the most callous adult feel like a teenager again.

Or maybe it is something more sinister — an illicit lunch break meeting in a secluded park far from prying eyes and husbands and wives, with darkened cell phones left back at the car to clear the way for an undisturbed soiree.

Although I always picture those kinds of things happening in seedy hotels along Route 3, maybe they’ve branched out.

Or maybe it’s something less unscrupulous. After all, it could be something sad — shockingly sad, perhaps — such as two people coping with the news of some illness that only one must face and pondering their own mortality in a place so rife with life.

Sometimes, it takes that sort of thing — that sort of calamity — to recognize the true worth of the things around us.

Regardless, each looks upon the other with feeling, with passion even, and that in itself is admirable.

A rustling in the wild-tailed forsythias, which are quickly turning from yellow to green, captures my attention for a brief second, and I notice the ground cover, little patches of clover and whatnot, is rising quickly because of the snowless winter and a lone cherry blossom tree is already in the midst of its annual sanguine fireworks display.

When I look back, the couple is walking away, arms around waists, in a slow, amiable saunter back to the parking lot.

I turn back toward the river.

Their story was probably not that insidious, and not that morose.

But in the end, their story matters not. It is spring once again.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com


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