What 600 Square Feet of Grass Taught Me About Forty Years of Marriage

Last summer, we got sod.

I know. Romantic.

It wasn’t exactly the anniversary weekend I had envisioned. I had dreamed of hiking and breakfast by the lake and maybe some lingering conversation that didn’t involve phrases like, “the root system needs moisture.”

Instead, we were up before sunrise laying 600 square feet of grass on what turned out to be the hottest weekend of the entire summer — 105 degrees, direct sun, and thirty-to-forty-mile-an-hour winds that seemed personally offended by our landscaping ambitions.

If you know anything about growing sod, you know those are not ideal conditions. In fact, they are the exact opposite of ideal.

The instructions said to water twenty to thirty minutes, three times a day.

Charming little instructions.

Clearly written by someone who has never tried to sustain plant life on what felt like the surface of the sun.

So we threw the instructions out and watered every two to three hours.

All weekend.

This was not what I had planned for our thirty-ninth anniversary.

But then again, very little about our marriage has gone exactly according to plan. And somehow, here we are — forty years in, three kids, four grandkids, and still married.

Now, before I sound too saintly in this story, let me be clear: I was not standing in that yard thinking, "What a beautiful metaphor for marriage."

I was annoyed.
Deeply annoyed.

I had other plans for our anniversary weekend, and repeatedly watering grass in 105-degree heat was not among them.

In fact, a year later, my husband still brings it up.

"Remember how mad you were when I ordered sod for our anniversary weekend?"
Yes. Yes, I do.

But funny thing about time — sometimes it reveals meaning that frustration hides. What felt like a ruined anniversary weekend became one of the clearest pictures of marriage I've ever experienced.

I used to have a plaque on the wall that said, “They say marriages are made in Heaven. But so is thunder and lightning.”
That pretty much covered it.

Here’s the thing about sod, and stay with me because I promise this is going somewhere: once it arrives, you’re committed. You can’t exactly leave it in a pile in your backyard and revisit the idea when the weather cooperates. Sod has no patience for better timing. You plant it, or it dies.

And if you plant it, you do whatever it takes to give it a fighting chance, even if that means hauling two garden hoses across the yard in triple-digit heat while sweat drips into your eyes and you question every decision you’ve ever made.

My husband started on one end. I started on the other. Separately, watering that entire stretch would have taken me forty-five minutes each time. Together, we got it done in under twenty.

I will be honest: that math alone did something for me. Forty years in and the man can still surprise me with his efficiency.

Maddening, really.

But it was more than efficiency.

It was the fact that we just… figured it out. Together.

We talked through options — a drip system, sprinklers, different routes with the hoses — and landed on the simplest solution: two people, two hoses, one stubborn commitment to not let something die on our watch.

What works for someone else’s yard doesn’t always work for yours.

Same goes, it turns out, for marriages.

Ours has never looked like anyone else’s. We are both passionate people — the kind of people who, when we argue, the neighbors probably assume we are either fighting or filming a reality show.

We feel things big. We say things loud. And then we come back to the table anyway.

For decades now, that has been our particular brand of thunder and lightning — loud and dramatic, yes, but also clearing the air. And somehow, by the grace of God, followed again and again by something that grows.

No one tells you the full truth about marriage going in. Or maybe they do and you’re too hopeful to hear it.

The greeting cards and the reception toasts all point toward the love story — the meeting, the falling, the beginning.

What they skip over is the long middle.
The seasons that are hot and dry and relentless. The years that look nothing like what you pictured when you said I do and meant it with everything in you.

There was a season, twenty-three years ago, when we almost didn’t make it here.

I had signed the divorce papers.
Ferlin hadn’t.

He wouldn’t sign unless I agreed to meet with a couple who did marriage coaching. I agreed, reluctantly. At that first meeting, I looked at Laurie and asked, “Give me one reason to stay married.”

And she said, “Because I believe in you both.”

I don’t know if she knew, in that moment, what those words would become. But today, forty years in, I can tell you this: sometimes hope starts because someone else is willing to hold it for you until you can hold it again yourself.

We have had seasons that were genuinely hard. Seasons that included signed divorce papers, cancer, sepsis, surgeries, and more waiting rooms than either of us would have chosen. The kind of hard that doesn’t usually make it into anniversary posts. The kind that makes you understand, at a cellular level, why commitment is a different word than feeling.

Feelings come and go like weather.

Commitment is what you do when the forecast is bad, the conditions are wrong, the instructions are useless, and you’re standing in your yard at two in the afternoon in 105 degrees wondering how you got here.

You grab the hose. You start on your end. You trust the other person has started on theirs.

Marriage is, at its core, a commitment to keep showing up, especially when you don’t feel like it.

When it’s uncomfortable. When you had a picture in your head of how this was supposed to go, and reality is not cooperating even a little bit.

We kept watering the sod because it needed it, not because we particularly wanted to be outside in that heat.

That’s not a metaphor I had to reach for. It handed itself to me barefoot in the backyard.

How many hard conversations have we had — have we both had — not because we wanted to, but because the relationship needed it?
How many times have we shown up to the difficult thing because the alternative wasn’t something either of us was willing to choose?

You do what the thing needs.

Even when it costs you something.

A few days after that weekend, I walked outside barefoot in the early morning. It was 68 degrees, and the sod was soft beneath my feet.

Alive. Green in a way that felt a little like showing off. It wasn’t perfect. A few patches didn’t make it. But the overall lawn was lush and real, and we had done that.

Together.

With terrible timing, wrong weather, and a watering schedule no instruction manual had ever suggested. I stood there thinking about forty years. About all the seasons that looked nothing like the brochure. About the thunder and the lightning.

About all the times we kept choosing each other anyway — not because it was easy, and sometimes not even because it felt natural, but because we had both made a promise we intended to keep.

To each other, yes.

But also to something bigger than us.

Something that held us together on the days we were not doing a very good job of holding ourselves together.

That’s the part that doesn’t fit neatly on a greeting card.
But it’s the part that’s true.

You don’t get a lawn like that by waiting for perfect conditions. And you don’t get a forty-year marriage by giving up when the forecast looks bad. You get it by grabbing a hose, starting on your end, and trusting that the other person has started on theirs.

Three kids, four grandkids, forty years, and one very resilient lawn later, I'd say the commitment was worth it.

Not because it was easy.

Because it was worth fighting for.

Even if we did miss breakfast by the lake.

If this resonated, share it with someone who’s in a hard season and needs the reminder that thunder and lightning aren’t the end of the story — sometimes they’re just what it sounds like right before something grows.