Love Comes When Least Expected

Excerpt from Love Comes When Least Expected: Missionary Love Stories by Olga Warner Penzin

. . . . After the wedding, we went to Corpus Christi for our honeymoon.”

“When we finally made it to Corpus Christi, Mary Jane and I had only four days for our honeymoon because that’s all they would give her off at nursing school without flunking her. . . . . Mary Jane all of a sudden started having stomach trouble. About three o’clock the next morning she started having stabbing pains in the lower right part of her abdomen which we suspected to be appendicitis. We rushed to the emergency room of the hospital. They woke up the attending physician.

“After he examined Mary Jane, he came in and had me fill out some paperwork. While I was filling out the paperwork, he said, ‘How long have you been married?’ I hated to say, ‘We’ve only been married two days,’ so I said, ‘We’ve been married only a short time.’ As we were filling out the paperwork, all of a sudden I heard this loud crash of metal. I turned around. The door to the medical room next door was half way open, and all I could see was Mary Jane’s legs and the hem of her dress laying on the floor. I went rushing in, finding her lying there in a pool of blood. Her face was covered with blood; there was a pool of blood under her head. I thought to myself, ‘I’ve been married for two days and my wife is dead!’ . . . . “What had happened was Mary Jane was allergic to penicillin. They gave her a mild form of penicillin which caused her to faint, fall, and hit the corner of a metal file cabinet. She needed eight stitches in her forehead and seven stitches on her lower lip. For the remaining two days of our honeymoon she had this huge clot on her lip, and every time we took pictures she had to put her finger in front of it.

“After our two, short remaining days, we returned home to Edinburgh, Texas. We drove down the dusty road to the Nellis' mobile home and as we parked--they had been expecting us--the door burst open, and there’s Mom and Dad Nellis and David and Dorothy Nellis all standing happily in the doorway. As soon as Mary Jane opened the door and stepped out, with all these scars and stitches and clot on her face, her mother’s mouth dropped, and you can see her concern, thinking, ‘What have you done to my daughter?!’

Ron Michaels

“It was a little plane on wheels--the little Aeronca . . . . It couldn’t land, but it dropped our mail, and the pilot did a great job of making it land right in front of our house and not in the river. Right on top was a note that said Al had just arrived in Peru, and a plane was to come out to get me, and we were to be married! There were about a dozen letters, but someone else had written the note that he had just arrived.

“Another radio was also sent out from Base Camp, but it took another two weeks for us to get it. . . . . We quickly finished our supper, got ready to set the radio up, and I knew I could talk to my sweetheart for the first time in a year--with the whole world listening to our sweet nothings. We started calling, and we called for forty-five minutes, but got no answer. Finally it crackled on, and we heard someone on Base say that they had gotten our first call, but their transmitter was out and they were madly trying to get it fixed.

“When Al and I finally talked, we started to make wedding plans. . . . . .

“It would be another three months of waiting for that plane to come. . . . . .

“One day Ellen and I were down at the river. We had just washed our hair when she said it was time for the plane to come. Just then we heard the plane. . . . . Al was in the plane! As the plane flew over, I thought Al probably looked down and wondered, ‘What did I promise myself to do?’ My hair was flying, and I was wearing my old moldy housecoat and my bathing suit.

“The plane couldn’t land, but they dropped a note . . . . . We were instructed to go three days down river by canoe to a place where they could land. Then they flew around again and dropped another note, which we did not find. . . . . When we got to the river the next day, we found the note that said another package drop had 99 letters for me. Al had counted them and put them in the packet. That packet is still out in the jungle somewhere, but I was going back to Base Camp to get my m-a-l-e!!

“. . . . We got off the river not knowing where they had landed or when they would be coming. We found a little stream down a little ways that would be a good place to take a bath, and while we were skinny dipping, there came the plane! Obviously we dressed very quickly.

“The Grumman Duck is amphibian. It can land on the water or on land. It did land on water, but then it just kind of walked up to the shore, at least that is the way it looked on wheels.

“Al and I met at the Playa No Me Olvides which means Forget-Me-Not Beach. Later, sitting on duffle bags in the cargo area of the plane, Al and I were making up for lost time while flying over the jungle, and I got my engagement ring! . . . . .

Jan Townsend