Seven Tales of Love

I wish I could tell Rose about this new thing. She would be able to make sense of it. She would come up with some explanation.

My Rose. When I first saw her, my heart stopped. She had moved into the house down the street. I’d been back from the war for about a year and was studying on the GI Bill. I was heading to the trolley on my way to the school library, books in arm. And there she was, coming down the front porch steps in some kind of hurry, adjusting her little hat, and nearly ran smack into me. She didn’t, but I dropped my books all the same. She stood there and laughed – our eyes locked and we laughed. We both knew that I had dropped my books from the effect of her beauty on me.

Well, I was smitten, as they say. She helped me pick up my books. Normally, I would not have allowed a woman to do such a thing, but that time I did – because it gave me a few more moments to look at her.

One thing led to another. We courted, and wed within the year. We were married on a Wednesday, but it was a Saturday when I first saw her and fell in love.

I had this little game I played: I used to buy her roses on the anniversary of the day I first saw her. Roses for my Rose. She didn’t know what a momentous day it had been for me. Oh, sure, I brought her flowers throughout the year. She always loved them so. Rose was raised in the country and was used to blooming things, and she missed that when her family moved to the city. So I bought her flowers, whatever I could find in season.

But on the seventeenth of every May, I came home with a bunch of roses, different colors. She especially liked those orangey pink ones, but I couldn’t always find them.

“What’s the occasion?” she’d ask.

And I’d say, “Oh, nothing special.”

But after a couple of years, she finally caught on. She cried when she figured it out. My soft-hearted Rose.