Romance,true love and debut novel

A seventy-six-year-old's debut romance novel?
Yes.  who should know better about romance and true love than a woman who's been married to the same man for fifty-eight years, and is still in love with him?

It was a chicken wishbone at my grandma's house--we called it a "pulley bone" back then--that started it all, even before he gave me flowers (from a florist, no less) for my tenth birthday. That, too, was at my grandma's house next door to my family.

You can read the pulley bone story on a previous blog post.

The flowers came from his aunt's and uncles flower shop, Mable's Florist in Besseemer, Alabama. I think they were carnations. I remember they were in a ceramic vase that was a little girl who had a basket of flowers on her back. I don't know what became of the vase, but I still have the card that was with it.

Kenneth was really bashful around girls. A cousin had told me he didn't like girls. But he was with his daddy who, along with my grandma and some teenage cousins, wanted me to marry him someday. So I imagine his daddy prompted him to give me the flowers.

My grandmother, a cousin, three of my then-five siblings, and I, all had birthdays in July, so we would have an ice cream party together in Grandma's backyard. We had gathered there when Kenneth and his daddy--Mr. Murray, we kids called him--got to the party (Mr. Murray boarded with my grandparents). And Kenneth walked up to me, turned his head, and said, "here."

See how romantic he was, even back then at barely thirteen-years-old?