Stop And Smell The Pink Roses

Herself's parents are arriving late this afternoon to this desert city.  They will remain here for the winter, enjoying the escape from the snow of their winter home, until early May.  The warmth and the sun are good for them.

Herself is preparing their house -- a quarter-mile down the street from hers -- for their arrival.  She has made carrot-cake muffins, since her mother fancies carrot-cake, and she has put together a fruit basket for them.  There will be flowers as well:  a nice harvest bunch, with a couple of sunflowers and autumn-colored miscellany.

As Herself perused the floral arrangements in the market this morning, she noted that there were, oddly, bunches of pink roses.

Ah, pink roses.

Nowadays, Herself generally eschews pink:  the soft pink of her youth has been cannibalized by aggressive PINK of  harsh colored lingerie of Victoria's Secret, female-oriented sports equipment, breast cancer awareness paraphernalia, and even pink-handled guns.  She knows she's a woman even without All Pink All The Time.  It has become an unnecessary color, an advertisement of womanhood she need not (and wants not to) display.

When Herself was young, though, she was quite fond of pink. Pink clothing, pink accessories.  One of her first pairs of glasses had (ack, the horror) pink-tinged plastic frames.  Part of her love of pink, she realizes now, was the channeling of a preteen desire to be more feminine - a necessity for a little girl who was regularly called "son" when she wore a hat covering her braids in the winter.  When the puberty fairy at last graced Herself with a more recognizably female physique, she wore less pink.  She did retain a certain affection for pink, though in more muted and deeper tones.

When Herself and Beloved Husband were to be married, the wedding was to take place in Herself's home town.  Since Herself was in school three hundred miles away for all but the two months preceding the wedding, Herself's mother took charge of much of the wedding planning and preparation.  Herself's mother was, and is, very in tune with How Things Should Be Done, so she had a much clearer idea of what needed to be involved to arrange the wedding.  Herself voiced opinions only about details for which she had specific wishes.

One of Herself's desires was to have pink roses as her bouquet.  In the many intervening months between her expression of that wish and the work of the florist, though, a bouquet of pink roses became a bouquet with pink roses:

When Herself saw the bouquet the morning of the wedding, she was a tiny bit disappointed at the paucity of pink; nevertheless, it was a lovely bouquet.  It was a good size, fresh and carefully arranged, with a couple of trailing tendrils of ivy and tender white roses as well as the few pale pink roses interspersed therein.  Ultimately, the flowers themselves did not matter much; what was important was that after over three years of a long-distance relationship, Herself and Beloved (soon-to-be) Husband would finally be together.
....

Standing in the market this morning, carefully avoiding getting in the way of the tired-looking young man who was mopping up a water spill near the flowers, Herself looked at the pink roses.  It had been a very long time since she thought about the details of the wedding, and almost as long since she had a desire for anything pink.

Pink roses.

Why not? She thought.

And so today, she has her pink roses.