The Conundrum of the Rose
By Sue Andrews, Inland Empire Branch
I met my husband over thirty years ago at our twentieth high school reunion in the suburbs of Chicago. I flew in from the Southeast coast and he flew in from the Southwest. You might say it was kismet because after having one wonderful evening together in the Midwest, our connection grew into a year-long bi-coastal relationship everyone said wouldn’t last. Both of us were on the rebound from horrible divorces.
The reunion took place in the eighties before cell phones and computers were common in the home. So the convenience of such a relationship was a challenge. We had to rely on our telephones; the kind found on counters or tabletops or hung on the walls of kitchens. It was also a challenge calling one another because of the three-hour time difference.
The only other way we could communicate was by sending cards or letters. At that time, it took one week to get from one coast to the other. Luckily, my husband was a good letter writer and I did receive something on a weekly basis. Our communication level was at a high level between weekly phone calls and letters. Since we were both educators, we planned to see one another on our holiday vacations.
During that year we communicated all our thoughts on paper. We held nothing back and shared on every topic imaginable. I knew Ken better than anyone I had ever dated locally over longer periods of time.
But what does this have to do with roses? My rose story has something to do with what I wrote Ken in one of those early letters. I told him to never buy me or send me a dozen red roses ever. Why he asked? It was because my ex-husband, an adulterer, used to send me a dozen red roses every time he cheated on me. I didn’t know it at the time, but figured it out later. The times I thought he was expressing his love for me, were actually times he had “gone out of town for business” or had “spent the night at a guy’s house after a sporting event.” It wasn’t love at all but a representation of guilt which he tried to forget or cover up.
To this day, after thirty-two years of marriage, my husband, Ken, has kept his promise. He has never bought me roses or any other flower for that matter. He did start another tradition however, which he’s kept our entire marriage. Every Valentine’s Day he buys me a half dozen chocolate-covered strawberries in the shape of roses. I hope that local specialty store where he purchases them never goes out of business.
This essay originally appeared in the February 2020 edition of
Fresh Ink, the newsletter of the Inland Empire Branch.