Expect to laugh and cry and experience many emotions in between as you take an insider look into a long marriage between opposites: plain Mennonite girl from the East coast merging with off-beat pioneer type from the West. Sparks fly, sometimes igniting arguments, other times finding harmony. Discover how their early commitment is sustained by mutual love and trust. Book includes 126 illustrations including art work by the author’s husband.

Take an intimate look into one couple's fifty-plus-year marriage in author Marian Beaman's My Checkered Life: A Marriage Memoir. Using a quilt motif, the author stitches together stories that make up the fabric of their daily lives including the clash of cultures, crisis in a travel trailer, surviving a robbery, and enduring financial hardship. Discover how the author and her husband learn the art of the argument with explosions both literal and metaphorical. Observe how they find common ground through their shared faith and commitment. This volume contains excerpts from autograph books and diaries of the early 1900s, treasured family recipes, original artwork, and restored photographs—the legacy of multiple generations as two American families merge, one from the East, the other from the West. The author connects the dots of her life backwards, with detailed reverse engineering of events to discover meaning in her life as a wife. Readers of Marian's first memoir, Mennonite Daughter: The Story of a Plain Girl can especially relate to her insider narrative, a closeup of one couple's companionable union.