Fall into Love: Lee Carver's story

An Autumn Remembered
A Fall into Love story by Lee Carver

Fifty years ago, my grad school roommate cornered me into a blind date with a guy in her German class. He invited me to the UNC Chapel Hill football game, for which we both had free student cards. I hadn’t been to a single game. I didn’t even know where to park or which section to sit in, but wanted to see a game before the season ended.

At the time, I lived off campus as a graduate biochemistry student and owned my first car. My prospective date had given his VW bug back to his dad because the university deemed that a student didn’t need a work scholarship if he could afford a car, and he worked in the library photo shop. So we’d use my car, and it wouldn’t cost the guy anything to take me. No strings. I accepted.

After the game Darrel drove around, tried to connect with his friends giving a hamburger party which never developed, and we wound up having dinner in an Italian restaurant. The date ran very long, and I had a terrible headache because I’d stayed up sewing until the wee hours the night before. I enjoyed his company and found him the most normal guy I’d ever met—no pretentions, not braggadocios, always polite, and he made no improper advances. At the end of the day, he said he’d call me.

Yeah, right.

But he did. We went to a movie, Bonnie and Clyde. I hated the movie but liked Darrel.

My roommate raved about the beauty of autumn in the North Carolina mountains. Being from South Alabama, I’d never seen the leaves as she described them. We don’t do autumn down there. “You’re going to miss it,” she said. “This is probably the last weekend the leaves will be pretty.”

In many hours of conversation, Darrel had spoken of having gone to the mountains during fall and over Christmas with his roommates in previous years. He knew where to go, and I had the car. So I, who never called men, phoned my new best friend. “Would you like to drive to the mountains with me to see the leaves this Saturday?”

He impressed me by filling the car with gas as we began the most beautiful, glorious drive I’d ever experienced. He bought us a KFC picnic, and we spread out on the deep, green grass in a field beside a little white Baptist church. In the grand setting of the North Carolina mountains dressed for autumn we began to realize we had something special.

"Tunnel of Trees" photo by Lee Carver

Four months after our blind date, I made a lovely wedding dress, my family came up from Alabama, and Daddy, a minister, officiated at our marriage.

Pictured: Lee Carver and her husband Darrel

This year we celebrated fifty years of courtship and marriage, our romantic season from September to February, by driving in search of autumn leaves. We went to Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Kentucky, Virginia—and the best place at the perfect time, Lake Placid, New York. Every day we walked in the crisp air, captured the colors in photographs, and praised God for his craftsmanship. Along seacoasts and in mountains for more than a month, we wrapped ourselves in glorious reds, oranges, and yellows. We held hands as we strolled and stopped for kisses in hidden glens. Red berries hung from flowers and trees along the Blue Ridge Parkway, in botanical gardens, and deep in the wild forests. We feasted our eyes and our souls on God’s creation.

When we’d drunk our eyes full of shimmering fall beauty, we started the drive home to Texas. On the way, we stopped for a week with our son and his family in Maryland, where fall had not yet gotten serious, but the crab was fantastic. During evening prayers the first night with Quinn, his wife Sue, and their three children, a sense of joy settled over my heart. 
This was what our fifty years was truly about: our adult son and daughter and the five precious grandchildren they had given us. Each of them has chosen to live in a loving relationship with God, each accepted salvation through Christ Jesus. Surrounded by their prayers, Darrel and I witnessed and felt the wholeness of our fifty years of love.

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Author bio: 

Lee Carver lived in the Brazilian Amazon for six years, the hardest and best years of her life. 

She and her husband served with a Brazilian organization, formerly MAF-Brazil, in which he flew an amphibious ten-seat Cessna Caravan over jungle area half the size of the United States. 

Their home in Manaus—the largest city in the world with no road to it—was a free guesthouse for missionaries, pilots, mechanics, and medical volunteers. 

She went on missions, speaks the language, and knows the people whose story she tells.

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Blurb for Lee's book Rebecca's Redemption: A nurse seeking redemption for past sins joins a doctor contending against the jungle. Both healers need healing.

Rebecca Singer once was the kind of nurse who partied all weekend and closed the bar with the last karaoke tune. Then she met the Lord and vowed to make up to Him for those wasted years by serving in the worst place in the world. She determined to earn her redemption in the Brazilian Amazon jungle.

Dr. Ed Pierce, a widower with two young daughters, operates a Christian hospital in the Brazilian Amazon. A lifelong believer, he struggles with the tragedy of losing his wife—his love, the mother of his children. When the mission board agrees to hire a nurse, he requests an American who can split her time between the hospital and home schooling his children. 

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Buy Lee's book on Amazon

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Connect with Lee:
Website ~ Blog ~ Facebook ~ Pinterest

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