LAKEWAY, Texas — Love can find you when you least expect it. Sometimes, it’s also where you least expect it.
One of the hardest decisions an adult may have to make is to deciding to move their mother or father into a senior facility.
It was “quite a shock to me,” Jan Matamoros said when it came time to move into an assisted living home. Her daughter brought up the idea with her a few years ago, after she lost her husband.
“I guess they think all of us have dementia,” she joked. “But we don’t.”
At first, Matamoros wasn’t having it. “Well I’m from Baton Rouge, Louisiana,” she said with her southern accent. “And I didn’t want to come to Texas.”
Eventually, she agreed. Matamoros started her new life at Belmont Village in Lakeway, Texas, and the last thing on her mind was love.
“No man had been in my apartment,” she said. That is, until she met Otto.
“And I talked her into it,” Otto Ewers said with a smile. His family also moved him to Texas, and when he saw Matamoros, he knew right away.
“I want to get to know her more,” he said. There was just one problem.
“Well,” Matamoros said, “I didn’t notice him.” Otto changed that with a knock on her door. “He said, can I come in and talk with you?,” Matamoras remembered. “And I studied a minute and I said, yeah, come in.”
The two talked for an hour. “And that kind of started the romance,” she said.
Clint Strickland runs Belmont Village, and he saw the couple’s love blossom.
“They start[ed] sitting together in the dining room and going on walks together,” he said.
Those walks turned into a walk down the aisle. “We had a beautiful wedding,” Matamoros said with a smile. “It was out by the pool.”
Matamoros and Ewers have been married for two years now, and they stay busy. On the day KVUE visited Belmont Village, the couple was part of a photoshoot, which is a tradition at the facility.
“The two of you look at me and smile,” Thomas Sanders said as he took pictures of a different couple. He has captured smiles like these for decades, photographing “tens of thousands” of Belmont residents.
According to Sanders, it never gets old. “One of the gentlemen was kissing his wife and he started to cry,” he said. “And like, it made me feel emotional.”
Soon, his photos of Matamoros and Ewers -and other Belmont resident including veterans– will line the halls of their new home.
Each picture represents stories of love, loss, and about how a hard decision can end up being the best decision.
Belmont organized these photoshoots at each of their locations across the country. They hope to have the pictures on the wall by November.