My Parents, in Love

How could I tell? It was clear in a single moment

- Lauren DePino

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, I could never tell if my parents were wildly in love or careening towards divorce. I awoke some mornings to the noise of their voices climbing, straining to make out their words from two rooms away. Other times I'd catch them planted in the middle of the couch watching Moonstruck, their hair back then ink dark like Cher's.

"I can't understand why you people just can't get along," my Sicilian grandmother would scold when she saw them fight. As I matured, I began to understand that, since they had married young (my mother was 18, my father 24), they were still forging their identities independently of each other. Early in their marriage, they juggled teaching full-time and working toward higher degrees while raising my sisters, 10 and 14 years my senior. Their relationship was bound to have its cracks.

It wasn't until my late 20s when I started spending a week with them every winter in Florida that I learnt that the foundation of Cathy and Andy DePino's 57-year marriage is anything but a fixed layer of stone. It thrives with fluidity and motion, like dancing.

Trip after trip, year after year, night after night, my mother would don a flowing skirt and sparkling costume jewellery and say, "Let's go to the dance!" Translation: 'Let's go to the bar with the live band and dance until they kick us out.