Love’s Edges

I’ve loved the idea of love for as long as I can remember. An eternal idealist. A hopeless romantic. An-all-about-true-love-kind-of-girl. Before you’re tempted to blame Disney or our typical pre-teen American culture, just know that I was never allowed to watch Beauty and the Beast or Cinderella and I grew up in rural Delaware near horse farms, entirely homeschooled. All I had to work with was the American Girl Felicity book where there was a hint of attraction between her and the horseman Ben on page 28 and a Little House on the Prairie episode (recorded from my grandparents who had cable) where Laura falls in love with Almanzo. But I was hooked on love. By the time I was 12 I was hiding in the aisles of the library to read adult memoirs on Princess Diana’s love life. So enamored with the idea of finding true love myself that I couldn’t even go to the Wal Mart parking lot in our small town without scouting out boys from the window of our red van and wondering, “Will he be my future husband?” I think this is what you call “boy crazy” or “homeschooled”. Either way, everything ended the same in my mind: marriage. […]