It is never too late to find, and keep, love.
This article is so delightful. I had a hard time choosing my favorite excerpts:
Ms. Morrow-Nulton and Mr. Shults were both born in May 1926. “I hope I make it to 100 so we can have five years together,” she said on May 22, just after her wedding to Mr. Shults in Ulster, N.Y. “He’s a delight to be with.”
Both had been widowed twice after 60-plus years of marriage. And both lived alone in their own houses. The couple’s extended families can be a challenge for them to keep track of: “We have ancestors coming out of our ears.”
Mr. Shults may not have been brilliant at showing it, but he found Ms. Morrow-Nulton enchanting. “She was cute, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “And she was smart and she had a delightful sense of humor. And she smiled at me.”
Both are also active in their churches, she at Tillson Community Church and he at Cross Point Fellowship Baptist church in Hurley. And both were in the habit of asking their Amazon Alexas to play 1940s music at home. “We like Perry Como and the 101 Strings Orchestra.” “He started bugging me for lunch every day,” she said. “I knew he loved me. He would call and say, ‘What are we going to have for lunch? Where are we going to go today?’” She did the driving. “My kids took my license away from me because I had three strokes and a broken hip,” Mr. Shults said. A couple with a daily routine that lingered late into afternoons. When the weather was nice, they went to Robert Frost Park in Ulster to watch boats drift along the Hudson River. The loneliness and isolation both said they felt before they met lifted. “You bet your life they were happy for me to find somebody at this age,” Mr. Shults said. For each, life without the companionship of marriage rang hollow.
Ms. Morrow-Nulton thinks she may have written down the date of the engagement in her diary. But neither remembers it exactly. “It’s like our first real kiss,” Mr. Shults said. “It’s not important to me when it happened, it’s the fact that it happened at all.” His strategy for getting Ms. Morrow-Nulton to agree to marry him was the same one he relied on to nudge her into the lunch routine. “I pestered her for at least a year. She kept saying, ‘No, no, no.’” Ms. Morrow-Nulton’s reluctance to accept his proposals, which eventually started coming daily just like the lunch inquiries, wasn’t out of a lack of affection for Mr. Shults. Or the notion that someone better might come along. “It’s true there’s not a lot of men my age,” she said. “And even though we’re both 95, I’m 12 days older. One of my friends said, ‘Oh, Joy, you’re a cougar.’” “I finally decided, ‘You better say yes.’ We have a good time together. He’s not like anybody else I’ve met in my whole life.”
“Nobody starts life at 95,” Ms. Morrow-Nulton said. “But we did.” “I’m not lonely anymore,” Mr. Shults said. Better still, “I don’t think we’ll get sick of each other.”
