A Cup of Comfort for Couples Read Online Free PDF

careers, families, philosophy, their mutual love of nature. Surely they would never meet again, so the letters were honest and without guile.
    Two years passed, and the Swedish doctor came to work in Seattle for a year. The man and woman met again, and began to fall in love. But he had a family to whom he was committed; she acknowledged that and honored his integrity. Once again, they reluctantly said farewell, and she went on to marry another.
    Over the years, she would wonder about the man and ponder the what-ifs and if-onlys.
    Nearly twenty years later, the woman had a dream. In the dream, the man stood in her kitchen with his wife. The wife — without sadness or anger — was turning over her husband to the woman. With a start, she awakened: What could her dream mean ? What on earth was happening in his life ?
    At the very same time on the other side of the world, the man typed the woman’s name into the Internet. Nothing. For months, he browsed the web, searching for the woman. Then, on this side of the globe, she typed in his name. Finally, they connected. His wife had died. She had divorced. Neither had forgotten the other.
    Once more the letters and now e-mail crossed. Early one July morning, the woman got a call. She hadn’t heard the man’s voice in two decades. He was at a medical conference in Denver. Within three hours, she was on a plane, risking everything on a spontaneous surprise visit. In a convention room filled with three hundred people, she found him. Twenty years spun back in time, and they were young again; nothing had changed.
    Nothing but circumstances, that is.
    In early November, the man flew the woman to his Sweden home for a two-week visit, which felt like a honeymoon.
    They went shopping together to decorate the new home he had just built. They wound through the narrow, cobbled streets of Gamla Stan (Old Town Stockholm) and clambered four flights of a centuries-old building to meet his eighty-five-year-old mother, who greeted the woman with a hug. She met his three grown children, who thanked her for making their father so happy and presented her with a gift upon her departure. She met his best friends, and together they laughed like old companions.
    They visited the cemetery on All Soul’s Night, when families light candles and small lanterns on the graves. He spoke of the numbness, the pain, the daily walk through the woods to this green gravestone. At the wife’s grave, the woman burst into tears. “I always wanted you but not at this price, never at this price!” she cried. The man and woman held each other, and came to understand that “for all things, there is a season.”
    Each day he brought her breakfast in bed. Once more, they talked and walked, and walked and talked, and the days were seamless, fluid, without effort. They cleaned, and they cooked, and they entertained. They listened to music and read aloud. They lit candles morning and evening against the cold November darkness. They traipsed the woods, and he showed her favorite places: the meadow the young parents had cleared late each spring for the children’s Midsommar Festival, the swimming rock, the enchanted hollow tree where the kids once played.
    They threw supplies into a duffel bag and climbed into his boat for the ninety-minute trip through the Stockholm Archipelago of 24,000 islands to his century-old cabin. The Baltic suddenly turned angry and wild, and she clung tightly to keep from being thrown from the banging boat while he steered them safely on. I would trust my life to this man she thought. I already am .
    They hunkered in the one-room cabin while the wind pounded at the red plank door. As the corner fire warmed the room, they stripped off layers of clothing and loneliness. Candlelight reflected in the tiny windowpanes and one another’s eyes in this wilderness on the edge of the world.
    Each day they laughed and loved and learned more about the other. Each day they