WINDSOR, Conn. — When someone asks Thelma Symonds, 85, why she would get married now — a question she admits isn't uncommon — her answer is a straightforward, "Have you ever been in love?"
Symonds has. Twice.
The first time was with Stanley B. Symonds, a native of Stafford who joined the Army after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended up in Symonds' home country of Australia.
Symonds, then a bookkeeper for sheep graziers, was introduced to Stanley, a member of the 41st Signal Corps of the 41st Infantry Division, when her sister, Norma, invited him home for dinner after meeting him in the department store he'd visited to have a gold braid sewn to his cap.
"He stayed on after dinner and played Monopoly with me," Symonds said.
The couple would meet every now and then for the next two years.
"They had a rest camp in the town where I lived, out in the woods. Every time they'd go out to battle, they'd come back to the rest camp. I only saw him when he came back," she said.
Despite an Army chaplain's efforts to convince the two their marriage would never work — "He tried to discourage American-Australian marriages," Symonds said — she became a 20-year-old "war bride," marrying Stanley and returning with him to Stafford in 1944.
When her husband died in 2000 after 60 years of marriage, Symonds, who's lived since then at the Kimberly Hall nursing home on Emerson Drive in Windsor, didn't plan on falling in love again and had no plans to find another partner.
But then, she hadn't counted on meeting the Rev. Chauncey Christofferson, 96, a resident of Washington state who served in the same 41st Signal Corps as her husband.
The two men never knew each other, but in July of 2005, Symonds' essay titled "Memoir of an Australian War Bride," submitted to the 41st Signal Corps' newsletter, caught Christofferson's attention.
"He read this memoir a couple of times, and about the third time, he sat down and wrote," she said. She recalled from memory his letter's introduction, which she described as "so formal."
"Dear Thelma, I wonder if anybody has honored your request to correspond with you. If you have heard from anyone, you don't need to answer this letter."
Symonds wrote back anyway, and said she really liked his name. They gradually fell in love. Christofferson, a widower whose wife of 55 years died in 2004, first told Symonds he loved her in letters, which she said got "more and more ardent" over time.
She was surprised the first time he wrote "Lots of love," but she wrote back in kind and included a few "Xs" as kisses.
It was last April, a week after Symonds' 85th birthday, when Christofferson arrived with an engagement ring, but they'd already promised themselves to one another two years before, Christofferson said.
"I'd gone back there three times, including the first time, and when I left the third time we were unofficially engaged," he said.
Christofferson, a longtime Lutheran minister, said he loves Symonds' vibrant personality. He added that they discovered over seven months of letter writing that they were meant for each other at this time in their lives.
On a recent day, Symonds pulled a framed picture of Christofferson from her nightstand and shared what drew her to him.
"Chauncey is such a special person. He's so sincere, he's so caring," she said.
She went on to describe him as lean, trim, active, and healthy.
"I told him he's so handsome I would have married him on the spot," she said.
The couple were married in a ceremony at Kimberly Hall South on Tuesday, Aug. 26.
"It's nice to see that love still exists as you get older," said Kara Trosen, the nursing home's therapeutic recreation director. "Even if you haven't had love for years, you can still find it in your 90s."
In a telephone interview from his home in Stanwood, Wash., before the ceremony, Christofferson said that on his wedding day he planned to wear a dark suit his son had tailor-made for him in Korea some years ago. Symonds planned to wear a long aqua dress with a lace, V-neck top.
"It's kind of nylon, spandex, polyester," she said, adding, "I'm not wearing white."
Symonds will be moving to Stanwood, Wash., to live with Christofferson in an assisted-living community.
The couple weren't anxious before the wedding.
"People ask if I'm getting cold feet," Christofferson said before the ceremony. "No way. It'll be very natural. We've both been married before for a long time, so we know what it's like."
While Symonds is no stranger to drastic moves — "You see, I made the big move in the very beginning (when) I moved from Australia to Connecticut," she said — the hard part will be leaving her friends at Kimberly Hall, where she's lived for last eight years.
Symonds has a stuffed koala bear she brought back with her from a 1966 visit to Australia that she planned to put on their bed in Stanwood. And since Christofferson likes to walk three miles a day, she plans to make accompanying him at least some of the way a part of their life, also.
"We love each other very much," she said.
Said Christofferson, "She just seems a part of me, you know."
