My Month of Love

Happy February 1st! In honor of the month of love, I am going to post each day about the people I love and why I love them. It stands to reason that I am going to start with my Flower Dave. Why do I call him Flower Dave? I'll post that story at the end of this post so scroll down if you are interested. Dave is the love of my life, not the first one, but absolutely the last one. Dave has taught me what it means to love so deeply that there are no words to describe it. While he was deployed, I learned what it meant to long for someone. How's that for an old fashioned word? Dave has shown me a life that I can live in with confidence that he is loyal and trustworthy. He doesn't send me flowers when we've had a fight, he stays and talks it out with me, and if he feels he needs to leave, he leaves in such a way that I know he is coming back. In fact, if he leaves, we will likely be continuing to work out our issue on the phone because we really want to work it out. More importantly that how Dave shows me he loves me and our life, he has shown Mason what it means to truly adore a woman and how to treat her. I mentioned not sending flowers when we fight, he sends flowers on my birthday, Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, and the first day of fall. I don't expect them and if they don't come, it's okay, but I do love them. Dave has planned dates for us that may be as simple as dinner in downtown, and as elaborate as tickets to a concert, dinner reservations, and it all started with an outfit I found on our bed with a note, "We've got plans for Friday night, plan accordingly." Yes, he is an amazing man, husband, father, and friend. Some say we got lucky, but I think it's more than that, I think we set up what we wanted to have, what we wanted to live and though we've had some bumps, we do the things we do because we want each other to know our marriage is important - you are important to me Flower Dave! Neither of us is perfect, and we've had moments we are not proud of, but they are far fewer than the ones that make up the happy memories of our life together that started in April of 1996 when I won him on the radio. I love you David, happy February 1, 2019! #MonthOfLove Dave sent me a huge bouquet of flowers after our first date. I was livid mad! I told him after the date that I didn't want to "date." Here I was holding flowers so big you couldn’t even see me, but you could hear that I was not happy. When I finally was able to express myself I said, “Now I have to have this talk with him all over again! Didn’t he hear me say just friends?” I immediately called and thanked him for the flowers but before he could even respond, I started right in on him, “I thought you understood that I just want to be friends, I thought you got that I am not looking for a relationship…blah, blah, blah” Poor Dave, I don’t even know why it is that we are the great friends that we are except to say that we have always been true to ourselves and each other. We have never had to pretend to be anyone we are not. After Dave sent me the flowers and I became so angry, that made quite an impact on my family and friends. They thought I was crazy because I was probably the only woman in this lifetime to get angry with a man for giving her flowers, this became a defining moment in our lives. My friends didn’t know any of the new people in my life so I always had to explain who I was doing things with. Since Dave and I were dancing and talking often - as friends - I started to refer to him as “Dave, you know, Dave, the guy who sent me the flowers.” This went to just Flower Dave and then simply to Flower.