"Toots" Vestal lay in state in my Funeral Home on that cold foggy Indiana Christmas day. A fine cold mist in the air. Not a single person called, perhaps due to the weather and the holiday. Toots and his wife, Dorothea, while not loners did not have a wide circle of friends.
Toots, a veteran of The Great War, had met Dorothea while they were employed by the same hotel in Capitol City. They had married late in life. They were not a handsome couple if I remember but they were devoted to each other.
Dorothea spent that entire day sitting in a folding chair in front of her husband's casket, refusing an offer of water or conversation, a manifestation of that love and devotion. I have seen all sorts of grief by too many widows. Dorothea's was the most sincere.
And I could not possibly have foreseen that 50 years later to the day, I would be sitting alone in front of a computer in Denver writing about a love I observed long ago.
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