The husband she resented became the one she needed

She spent a lifetime cursing the man she married. Then, past seventy, the pandemic shut them both indoors and the two of them faced each other all day. Strangely, it was the evenings without him that frightened her most. Mornings she made tofu soup; by night they bickered and snapped. Only after a few years of that did she understand: the one person who had crossed all those hard years with her was this man. Geum-ja Jang, 74, wrote it for the national literacy poetry exhibition from her class in Jeungpyeong.