１月９日の英文添削「日本語での解釈例」への挑戦として以下のものを書いてみました。講師のどなたかに添削して頂き結果を後日投稿します。これを機会によい英文が書けるようになりたいと思います。

A husband and wife had happily been married for 60 years.  The only secret between them was a shoebox the wife kept in her closet.  The husband had been forbidden to open it.

On her deathbed, however, the husband opened the box with her blessing.  He found a crocheted doll and $95,000 in cash.

Puzzled by the revealed secret after 60 years, he asked his wife what they meant.  She explained that she only kept her mother’s word.  “My mother told me that the secret to a happy marriage was to never argue,” she said. “Instead, I should keep quiet and crochet a doll.”

The husband was touched.  There was only one doll in the box.  That meant that she wanted to argue with him only once in 60 years.  It was enough to prove how good a husband he had been, always trying to be nice to her, never saying unfair things.

But, the $95,000 remained a mystery.  Asked the meaning of it, the wife explained, “That’s the money I made from selling the dolls.”  This turned the husband’s initial interpretation of the secret the other way round.

The wife had put the first doll in the shoebox.  When she had the situation to crochet the second doll, she realized that she would need an enormous space to keep all the dolls she’d make from then on.  So, she sold the first doll to make room for the second one, and placed the money she received in the same shoebox.  She had repeated this process, until the sum of money reached $95,000.

She was a broad-minded wife, if ostensibly, having put up with her husband’s unfair deeds countless times, to wit, the number of times for $95,000’s worth of dolls plus one, but was not so broad-minded as to leave this world without spilling a single word of the truth.