Jun 9, 2016 3 min read

“It’s beautiful here during your winter there, and my farm has all its fruit ready to pick.”

That sentence was more or less what led me to have the farmer here with me in Pennsylvania. He was living in western Argentina, at the foot of Cerro Nevado Mountain, when we reconnected on the internet. We’d spent our grade school years living across the street from each other, and then lost touch.

You should come for a visit. It’s beautiful here during your winter there, and my farm has all its fruit ready for picking.

And so I went. We were conversing online for many months by then, and it was obvious he was intelligent, kind, funny and industrious, but with that sentence, the farmer passed the test of one of my other relationship deal-breakers.

He had good grammar.

That opening sentence can be tricky. It contains not one but two versions of its, and he deployed the apostrophe correctly. (Good lord, this woman is persnickety, you are saying.) Right you are. But just like some women hate men with facial hair or require their men to have beards and tattoos, I am concerned about the its and it’s.

I take it personally when I see the apostrophe used incorrectly in advertisements, TV news graphics and on social media, where the misuse is as ubiquitous as foolish pranks and duck-lip selfies. When I see apostrophe mistakes I think: Don’t these people read? And not just snippets in the internet, but actual good writing?

I concluded the farmer was a reader, which I liked. After several months, I bought my plane ticket.

And then there came this:

“It’s hard to get decent shoes here in the wilderness,” he wrote. “If I order them online and have them delivered to your house, will you bring them with you?”

When the package arrived at my door, I was faced with a relationship test I had not had to consider.

What if he wears goofy shoes? As I looked at the unopened box, I thought of the possibilities of what horror could lie within – clunky white Velcro sneakers, shiny white patent leather loafers with square toes, lace-ups with really pointy toes or clogs.

Would I think less of him? Would white patent leather suggest he might have a polyester leisure suit in his closet? Should I cancel my flight right now? In all those hours of emails and Skype conversations, the topic of his shoes never came up. And now I would have to face my own shallowness.

I decided not to unwrap the shipping package. I put it in my suitcase and hoped for the best.

Five thousand air miles later, he opened the box. They were brown leather slip-on Keen loafers. Very handsome and nice. So was the farmer.

That was five years ago, and his taste in shoes remains completely acceptable. I particularly enjoy seeing him in a certain pair of work boots.

Oh, and you’ll notice he used the correct form of your in that first sentence, too. Be still my heart.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.