Aint That The Way Love's Supposed To Be...

When I was a kid my dad and I used to take long walks along the old railway line near his house.  Wild flowers and butterflies lined the embankments, birdsong and summer haze filled the blue skies.  We would walk and talk and laugh together for hours.  Our private world was punctuated by the people and dogs we would meet along the way, some of them new, some of them familiar faces.

One of our favourite group of people to meet was an elderly couple, they must have been in their seventies but to me they looked as old as the mountains.  In summer they wore shorts which exposed their soft wrinkled skin folding away from their stick thin limbs like paper caught by an imaginary breeze.  In winter they would wear yellow raincoats like the kind fishermen wear in cartoons.  

Whenever we met them, they were always, without failure, holding hands.  Walking along, they were holding hands.  Sitting on a bench, they were holding hands.  They didnt seem to talk that much, in fact a lot of the time they would walk in silence, but not for one moment did they ever let go of each other's hands.

My dad used to joke that they held each other's hands to stop the wind from blowing them away.  We both knew that wasnt true though.  If anything was holding them up, it was purely love.