The Real Romance…

Yesterday was a beautiful day at the Art Fair, one of our favorite dates of the year. But it was nothing compared to today. 

Today made me stop and think: Maybe we’ve been romanticizing the wrong things all along.

Maybe romance isn’t standing in the rain quoting lines from The Notebook. Maybe it isn’t grand gestures or diamond necklaces or rose petals scattered across a hotel bed. Maybe the real love stories are quieter than that. Smaller. More human.

My mom used to make a casserole I loved when I was growing up. It wasn’t fancy. Just noodles, meat, green beans - simple comfort food. The kind of meal that made home feel like home.

When she got sick, everything happened fast. Within a few months, the cancer had already started stealing pieces of her from us, including her ability to speak more than a word or two at a time. We were so focused on fighting for her - hoping, praying, refusing to believe the odds - that it never occurred to me to ask her to write recipes down. Or maybe it did, but saying those things out loud would have meant acknowledging what we were all terrified of.

And we weren’t ready to do that.

By the time we realized we should have asked, it was too late.

So when we lost her, I lost that casserole too.

For 22 years, I tried to recreate it. Over and over. Different noodles. Different binders. Different seasonings. Nothing tasted right. It was always close enough to remind me what I was missing, but never close enough to bring it back. Eventually, I stopped trying.

And then tonight, J made it.

Exactly right.

Twenty-two years later, I took one bite and instantly felt like I was sitting back in my childhood kitchen again. Like grief and memory and love had all somehow found each other in one casserole dish.

And honestly? This is the kind of thing they should write romance novels about.

Not the dramatic declarations. Not the over-the-top gestures. But someone loving you enough to pay attention to the story behind something small. Someone caring enough to try to recreate a piece of your heart you thought was gone forever.

You can buy people all the presents in the world, but sometimes the greatest act of love is simply listening closely enough to learn what they miss.

That’s romance.

That’s the stuff worth romanticizing.