There are sounds that never leave you.
For me, it’s Arthur’s laugh. Deep, rich, a little mischievous. The kind of laugh that could fill a room and smooth the edges of a hard day. I first heard it in 1952, outside the bakery on George Street. He’d dropped his meat pie, looked up at me with a shrug, and laughed like the world hadn’t just crumbled in pastry at his feet.
I think I fell in love right then.
We were married in the spring of ’54. It was a simple church ceremony—lace gloves, borrowed veil, sandwiches in the church hall afterwards. We didn’t have much, but Arthur made everything feel grand. He found joy in the smallest things: ironing his shirts to music from the wireless, fixing up the old Holden on Saturdays, reading the paper out loud in a way that made headlines sound like bedtime stories.
He made me laugh, too. Especially when he danced. Arthur was tall, lanky, and rhythmically cursed—but he’d twirl me around the kitchen like Fred Astaire, humming to Perry Como.
We had three children. He called them “the trilogy,” as if our life together had chapters. And now, decades later, I sit with a cup of tea and a biscuit he would’ve stolen when he thought I wasn’t looking, and I can still hear him—laughing in the garden, chuckling at his own corny jokes, whispering one last joke into my ear at night.
Arthur’s gone now. But his laugh… it lives in the walls of our home, in the memories of our children, and in the very rhythm of my heart.
Some loves never fade. They just echo.
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