Throwing Away Memories

That isn't an entirely honest title - throwing away memories. Really, I am throwing away the things that symbolize these memories - not because I don't want to remember them. It had to be done because it involves dried flowers.

This is a picture of us the morning we got engaged. 

My mother-in-law took care of drying the roses you see next to me, as I flew back to Tucson that day in a daze. When I moved to Maryland a week later, I kept the dried bouquet in a vase in my room, and when we married nine months later and moved into our own place, the flowers moved with me. They are special to me because they were the first red roses Beau gave to me. Before our engagement the flowers he gave to me were various shades of pink and purple. 

But on this day he gave his first red roses and said our first "I love you." 

Over time, dried roses collect dust and lose their color, and eventually there is no place that you can put them without making the area look dumpy. So it was with great sadness (truly... there were tears) that I put them in the trash last week. I almost pulled them back out but there was not even one rose that was nice enough to keep. When I left the house the next morning to go to work, I walked past the garbage bag that Beau had put at the curb, our roses peeking out the top as if to say, "We're still here! You have one more chance to keep us..." Some petals had fallen off and were scattered on the sidewalk. To anyone walking by it would have been nothing out of the ordinary, but to me it was carnage. 

The happy ending to this, as Beau reminded me through my tears, is that I've got the real thing - my husband. He tells me he loves me every day, I don't need old roses to remind me. We'll keep making new memories - and we'll remember the old ones - together.