She made the first move.
It was four days after Valentine’s Day 2013. Merna Kinnison typed her letter. She included a copy of an old card, a small valentine from the days of flappers and failing banks.
Hello, Warren, she began. Surprised?
Back home in Fairfield, Warren Harms, a widower for nearly a dozen years, sure was surprised.
He’d given Merna that valentine in 1931, when they were in country school together, 4 miles from the tiny town of Glenvil.
Each student was allowed to give just one valentine. He picked this one specially from a package his mother had bought. A little girl with golden hair, sitting on a swing, surrounded by hearts.
Just like the girl who sat by the window at school, the afternoon sun on her hair.
People are also reading…
“Her hair would glisten,†he remembered Wednesday. “She looked like a sweet little girl.â€
He was in the sixth grade that year.
Merna was 7, just a third-grader. They’d walk home from school together in a bunch, Merna and her siblings, Warren and his brother.
“I would give her rides on my bike,†he says. “She remembers that because she got her foot caught in the wheel.â€
Merna hadn’t remembered getting the Valentine though, not until her nephew returned the cardboard piece of her past, found among her mother’s things.
Merna and Warren smile. He’s nearly 93 now. She turned 90 in August.
They’ve been sweethearts for more than a year, a friendship that picked up steam through the U.S. mail.
“It just kind of came on gradual,†Warren says.
Merna brings a stack of cards from the bedroom, postmarks from a Hallmark courtship. She brings Warren coffee with a touch of Coffee-mate, the way he likes it.
“Too bad we didn’t have time to make cookies today,†she says.
They love to cook together, and grocery shop together, and sing together, and read the Word, she says.
He sparkles when she talks, a petite woman with snow-white hair, wearing a cozy turquoise sweatsuit.
She sparkles when he talks, a big man in an easy chair wearing a cowboy snap shirt and Crocs.
Warren has to get going soon. He went through chemo and radiation after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma this summer, and he needs to visit his doctor.
One of his daughters is picking him up. He’s been staying with another daughter out near Bennet during his treatment.
He still has a place in Fairfield, 100 miles west, near where he and his wife, Virginia, raised their six kids.
But this apartment on Calvert Street is home, too. A love nest for him and Merna.
Merna married Byron “Red†Kinnison in 1942, the year Warren married Virginia. The Kinnisons raised five children in Edgar and ran the grocery store there for 37 years. Merna went back to school and became a nurse, working as an LPN at the hospital in Hastings until 1994.
Red’s been gone for 20 years.
“I never thought I’d get excited by having a man friend,†Merna says. “When he put his arm around me, my old heart just flipped.â€
Age doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to love.
“We got a lot more going for us than a lot of young folks do,†she says.
Warren and Merna lost touch after country school. They both left Glenvil when the government bought up acres of farmland to build a bomb depot in 1942, the concrete bunkers still dotting the land off U.S. 6.
They saw each other just once in all those years, when Warren stopped by Merna’s 80th birthday party, invited by her brother.
Until that valentine arrived in the mail.
Maybe our paths will cross again someday …
The letters went back and forth for months, until Merna dislocated her shoulder and ended up in a nursing home and Warren came calling.
“He tracked me down,†she says.
“I thought it would be the Christian thing to do to visit her,†he says, his eyes twinkling like a schoolboy’s.
Their families are happy they found each other.
“They are so sweet together,†said Warren’s daughter Buffy Cornish. “We all hope they have many years together before the Lord takes them.â€
Merna gives Warren a kiss before he leaves to see his doctor, pats his cheek.
She sits down to finish her coffee.
That morning, in the bathroom getting ready for the day, she started thinking about an old song. She asked Warren if he remembered the words.
He did.
And they sang it together in the living room, their voices not what they used to be.
Let me call you Sweetheart, I’m in love with you. Let me hear you whisper that you love me, too ...