Our Love Story Part 2

Chapter 2: The Courtship

(During my mostly self-imposed quarantine, I will be sharing a series of stories about how the relationship developed between Esther, a young woman from Switzerland, and me. You can read the first chapter here: Chapter 1: The Encounter)

Esther and I met in late November and got married late December the following year. Normally ours wouldn’t have been considered a whirlwind courtship, especially since I was over 30 years old. But if I were to tell you that during that time, we lived in the same town for fewer than six weeks before we were married, you might consider it whirlwind-like.

On our first date, I took Esther to Wichita to see a movie. I don’t remember the title, but afterwards we stopped off at Taco Bell for a bite to eat. I remember outlining on a napkin the names of our siblings; she had 9 and I had 10. The first thing we found that we had in common. There wasn’t much else. We struggled with communication. Her English was better than my German, but that wasn’t saying much.

Esther got three warnings about me. The first one came from her host parents. When they heard she was going out with me her host mom exclaimed: “Goodness gracious, sakes alive. He’s dated a lot of girls and can’t make a commitment,” they said. “I would avoid him if at all possible.” They added that I was known to be interested in Latin women. Hesston is a small town, everyone knows everyone, and they were kind of correct. But then again, I hadn’t met Esther yet!

Later Esther asked me, “How is it possible that a fine upstanding Christian woman would say, “Goodness gracious sex life???” That was what she understood her host mom to say. This was the first of many uproarious language errors we each made over the years.

At Christmas I received my first gift from Esther. It was a bilingual German/English New Testament. The German version was the easy to read “Gute Nachrichten” and the English version was the equivalent “Good News for Modern Man.” I cherished the gift and vowed to increase my German knowledge by reading the New Testament in German.

Over Christmas, Esther’s best friend from Switzerland visited her in Hesston. They met in nursing school and had done numerous things together over the years, including spending a year as volunteers with a Swiss missionary doctor in Israel. Her friend decided not to do the IVEP program, but instead arranged to stay with a Mennonite missionary doctor and family that they had met in Israel. They lived in Morgantown, West Virginia.

We decided to go to Wichita to a coffee house that had a live band playing. Esther’s friend sat in the back reminiscent of the trip to the German restaurant with students a few weeks earlier. As I piloted my VW Beetle, which Esther dubbed “huggie buggie,” toward the interstate, I reached out to take Esther’s hand. On previous dates, this meant that she would snuggle closer to me and hold my hand as well. Not so tonight. She moved closer to her door and coldly refused my hand. Oh dear, what’s going on? Even though we had a fun time at the “concert” with her friend, Esther avoided any close physical contact with me or endearing looks. Doubts began to cloud my head. I thought that she had decided, upon the arrival of her friend and remembering her homeland nostalgically, that I wouldn’t fit in her future.

Esther and I didn’t have much time to move our relationship beyond that disconcerting night, because at the beginning of January, I led a group of Hesston College students to Mexico for what was called Interterm. We were headed to a language institute in Saltillo. This was the last full month for Esther to be in Hesston, since IVEPers were moved to a new location after their mid-term conference. She was scheduled to leave for Roanoke, Virginia, several weeks after I returned from Mexico. I was quite busy shepherding a group of students while also taking a course at the institute. We all stayed with host families. After I settled in, I sent a postcard to Esther to let her know I was thinking of her. She never got it.

I only sent one postcard because I was holding back on what I thought was a cooling off of our relationship after her friend’s visit. She spent the whole month wondering why she got no communication from me. She also remembered her host family’s warnings about my interest in Latin women and was worried that I had gone a-wandering.

After returning from Mexico, I attended Hesston Mennonite Church on the first Sunday I was home. I spotted Esther entering with her host family. My heart skipped a beat, but I didn’t yet know that she hadn’t received my postcard. After church, her host dad approached me and asked me to join them for lunch at the Colonial House, the best restaurant (and only one?) in town. He obviously was oblivious to what strains there might be between us and how awkward things could potentially become. Wanting to see Esther, I nervously accepted.

I sat across from Esther at the restaurant. I engaged in a lot of small talk with Esther’s host parents about things in Hesston and my trip to Mexico. Esther kept her head bowed during most of the chit-chat, not adding much to the conversation. My mood was getting gloomier and gloomier to the point that I thought things were over for us. I kept the chatter alive trying to fill the void in my spirit with what I thought was clever conversation.

At one point in the afternoon, Esther lifted her head and looked directly at me, fixing her eyes on mine for just a bit more than normally accepted social convention. That look went straight to my heart. It communicated to me more than any words could have done. It told me that it was okay for me to pursue the relationship. And so I did.

In February Esther left for her mid-term conference in Pennsylvania and then on to Virginia. We saw each other a few more times before she left, agreeing to keep in touch, but still not sure of where this was going. I surprised her greatly with a huge bouquet of flowers for Valentine’s Day that arrived at her new home in Roanoke, and that seemed to make up for the lack of attention she thought I had shown her while in Mexico.

Shortly after she arrived in Roanoke, she got her second warning. It was from the director of the IVEP program. She had heard that Esther was seeing a US American man. “Don’t let your heart be broken,” she wrote. “As soon as you leave for Switzerland, he will forget you.” Technically it was against the rules for IVEPers to date while in the USA. She didn’t forbid Esther from having contact with me but tried her best to discourage it. Many years later, when Esther and I were in the process of applying for a position with MCC, we visited her in her office. She gave us her blessing.

I visited Esther in Roanoke during my spring break. On April 1, when I saw her for breakfast, I said, “Look, it snowed last night!” With her mouth wide open, she looked outside to see green grass and new buds on the trees without a trace of snow. “April fools,” I exclaimed to her! She giggled delightedly to discover that English has the same April fool’s joke as they have in German. Over the years we discovered many such similarities in idiomatic expressions in our two different languages.

Our long-distant relationship continued to grow. At the end of my semester of work, my good friend and former roommate got married. Esther returned to Hesston for the ceremony. At the time I had a sister living in Charlottesville where her husband was attending medical school at the University of Virginia. She found a summer job for me and invited me to live with them for the summer so that I could visit Esther on the weekends—about a two-hour drive. After the wedding, I loaded my “huggie buggie” and moved to Virginia taking Esther along with me.

Somewhere along that long drive from Hesston to Roanoke, we stopped at a Chinese restaurant to eat. After the meal we received the expected fortune cookies. Esther asked me to read mine out loud to her, which I did. Then it was her turn. She began “Be sure and don’t wait too long . . .” she couldn’t finish reading her fortune because I burst out laughing, much to her embarrassment and the amusement of the other diners. I knew by the sentence structure that she was making it up as she went. Instinctively I knew what she was going to ask. She wanted a commitment from me. This was the watershed moment for our relationship. We agreed to get married. There was no kneeling with a ring at some exotic place with a photographer waiting to capture the moment to put on social media. It was simply two souls who wanted to join their lives together amidst the unbecoming smells of Chinese cuisine. Ever after I’ve joked that Esther proposed to me.

Shortly thereafter, I began making plans to go to Europe for a year. I didn’t go on the choir tour I expected to go on but getting married in Switzerland seemed even more exciting. I took a leave of absence from my job and enrolled in a Goethe Institute in Freiburg, south Germany for a semester of German study. From there I could visit Esther in Switzerland on weekends. We planned to get married during the Christmas season after my studies were over.

Esther wrote to her parents about my proposed arrival to Switzerland. That is when she got her third warning. “We don’t want to meet Don,” her mother wrote. “We know he will take you away from your homeland and family.” Her warning was prophetic, even if at the time I was fully intending to relocate permanently to Switzerland. I had taken a leave of absence from Hesston as a backup.

Weekends in Roanoke during the summer months were filled with fun. Esther was an au pair for two young boys and her host parents were busy with a furniture business and with their church. Her host father had been a volunteer with a similar program in Germany before he was married. Esther’s English improved immensely, using it daily with the boys. She even picked up baseball lingo while accompanying them to their little league games.

My job painting at a government hospital wasn’t the most fulfilling, but I needed the money for my trip and looked forward to my weekends with Esther. We attended a young married Sunday school class each week and were dutifully embarrassed when they chose a Christian book on sex as one of their topics for discussion. “You guys are engaged,” they reasoned. “It’ll do you good.”

Esther left for her home mid-August. I scheduled my trip to Europe for the middle of September, several weeks before the semester at the Goethe Institute began. That gave me a few weeks in Switzerland before study. That is the subject of my next chapter.

Chapter 3: Meeting the family