Happy Birthday, Will.
It's a beautiful day out there today, nothing like the day Mary and I tied the knot here on the farm--in an April snowstorm 21 years ago. The cold was so intense that afternoon, that one of my dad's salesmen stood too close to a propane heater and unwittingly coaxed a smolder out of his toupee. My nephew Danny was having trouble pronouncing his "R"s back then and he blurted out, "Heah, misto yo how is borning." ("Heah, Mister, you're hair is burning.")
They say weather on your wedding is good luck, and that's been true for us: six kids, same business, near constant companionship...and still friends. Praise be to the Almighty.
When I was a younger man, I can remember women obsessing over their hair, and wondering which bouffant would do the trick to win the man of their dreams. To this day, I don't think I've ever heard a guy friend say, "don't you just love her hair?" It's not even in the top ten list of qualifications. I can tell you that men--gentlemen anyway--are far more attracted to the old world virtues than the female lipstick-and-glitter press would have you believe. In my case, Mary had an aura of hard work and optimism about her--a cheerfulness about business, about entrepreneurial ideas, about work that was the precise opposite of the shoe-and-dress-and-purse shopaholic I had dated just before her. If Mary were ever a feminist, she hid it pretty well. (Men may marry a woman who whines about the glass ceiling, but they won't be happy with the sound of the pounding and the breaking and the shattering.) I wonder if there wasn't something cosmic about God's promise to Adam, to provide him a "helpmate." God didn't say, "I will provide him a big-haired woman who will shop him to death." He promised someone who would "help" him.
So..anyway..girls, if you want to catch a husband, learn the virtues of hard work. It's a lot sexier than you think. There's no bigger turn-off among men than the words "high maintenance."
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