Karla’s Korner: Love

I am proud to introduce a new column to Madame Deals! I think we all need a touch point a place we can go to be inspired. Karla is my children’s teacher, a good friend, and a person with a heart of gold. I hope that her words will inspire you to do more. We are only as good as the people we surround ourselves with. It is important to listen with your heart and proceed with your eyes open. Enjoy!

Love:

It’s February, the month of love. I decided that since Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, what better topic for this week’s article than LOVE. The word love is defined as a strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties. This little four letter word has a wide variety of meanings and is commonly used in everyday language as a means of affection. But what does it mean?

When I think about love the first person I think of is my husband, David. Our life together has been far from perfect, but it’s ours and we are thankful for it. When I met David, I was just 19 years old. Over the past 23 years, that young 19 year old girl slowly disappeared and in her place is a somewhat older, grayer, heavier version of her. And David, well yes, he’s gotten older right along with me. His hair has thinned a bit, the mustache is gone but the love, well the love is still there. It’s always been there.

I met David at work in the fall of 1987. He was working as the housekeeping director at a local private college and I was a secretary. I had seen him from time to time, but felt certain that he was taken. He was just too handsome not to have a girlfriend. After a while, I realized that he was spending quite a bit of time inspecting my office building, stopping by to make sure everything was going well. Then, one afternoon he shyly asked me if I would be interested in having dinner with him. Of course, my answer was yes. Our first date was simple. He cooked dinner at his apartment and we watched a movie on VHS. The movie was Crocodile Dundee and from time to time we will watch it and remember that evening from so very long ago. That date was the beginning of our life’s journey together.

Over the course of the next five months, we spent as much time together as we could. But unlike most young twenty-something’s, we didn’t go out a lot. We spent our time at home, grilling, shooting pool (he had a pool table in his basement), talking and just being together. We talked all the time. And it was during those five months that we fell in love and never looked back. David proposed to me on September 30, 1988. We set the date for our wedding and exactly one year later on September 30, 1989 I walked down the aisle of a little country church into the arms of my Carolina boy and became his wife.

Throughout the past 21 years as husband and wife, we have experienced quite a few ups and downs, but our love has remained. We have experienced moves to various towns, cities and states due to his job, we’ve lost a few pets, gotten a few new ones, there have been illnesses, we celebrated the births of our two beautiful children, mourned the loss of our second child and the loss of my grandparents and David’s father and most recently, a cancer scare for me that thankfully turned out to be negative. But in all of this, love remains. However, is the love that we have now the same as it was when we first began? Absolutely not and I am thankful for that. That statement may surprise some, but for me, it makes perfect sense.

You see, when you are young and newly “in love” you try so very hard to be your best all the time. You want to look perfect, act perfect; you want to impress. Quite often love is represented by candy, flowers, love letters, sparkly gifts and more. And while it is still important to be and give your best, what I have found is that our best has changed. We no longer feel the need to impress, because honestly he’s already impressed with me and me with him. As we have grown and matured, our love has done the same. Now, our love is represented by simple things in our life. Love is an empty dishwasher, a warm car on a cold morning, a simple text to let the other know you are thinking of them and falling asleep holding hands. Love is turning the porch light on when he comes home late at night or fumbling to get ready for work in the dark so he doesn’t wake me up. Love is sharing our faith openly with each other, raising our children together and trusting each other always. Love is open, honest, plain, simple and forever. It’s us…..it’s love.

~Karla Robey