love story: red roses

yesterday when i got home from work there were a dozen red roses waiting for me on the front stoop.  my husband always gives me my valetine's day flowers at least the day before.  he wants them to be there so i can enjoy them all day.  i always get red roses and there's a reason why:

my husband and i met in the last semester of law school.  we were just friends when we graduated.  he went to milwaukee and i went home to chicago.  he was a smitten kitten when it came to me but i wasn't interested.  after we graduated i was terrified of the bar exam.  law school wasn't easy for me and this test was more than i could handle.  he invited me up to visit right when my review course started and i was going, but just for the night.  nothing more and i was going to tell him that i was going to be unreachable until the exam was over.  i headed north on a friday night with kind of a weird feeling that something wasn't right.  just over the wisconsin border i was cruising along in the left lane with a semi in the middle lane.  some idiot merged on the highway at a million miles an hour and crossed over two lanes of traffic.  the semi must have blocked the driver's view of me because i was waiting in the left hand lane as he made his merge.  i tried to get out of the way and in the process lost control of my little geo prism.  i was so scared.  i knew the only way that my car was going to stop moving was if i hit something.  and i did.  i hit the median.  i thought my chest exploded and that i got punched in the face.  luckily that was just the air bag.  i did a head to toe check, mostly making sure i still had all my teeth.  all seemed well until i took a look at my left ankle.  no ankle should look like that.  i didn't even bother calling 911.  i figured someone else would have that handled.  i called my mom and i called him saying that i wasn't going to make it.  the poor guy, he barely knew where he was (he's from indiana, not wisconsin), let alone where i was.  the emergency vehicles came and backboarded me out of my car.  i rode in an ambulance for the first (and hopefully last) time.  i felt very alone and knew it was going to be a long time before my parents would arrive.  the most beautiful sight i've ever seen was watching him burst into the emergency room.  i was so relieved to see a familiar face and he was carrying red roses.  the nurses fell in love with him and my parents did too when they got there.

there was no summer bar exam for me as i had a bimoleolar fracture (i broke the bones on the inside and outside of my ankle).  i had surgery with pins and plates.  he came and visited me (at my parent's house--brave soul) every weekend even though he was studying for the bar too.  he sent me red roses on the day of my surgery.  slowly over these weeks of visiting, i fell in love with him too.  if i hadn't smashed my car on the way to visit, i would have told him i couldn't see him while i was studying and he wouldn't have brought me red roses and my whole life might have ended up differently.  i carried red roses on my wedding day and he wore one too. 

red roses are the beginning of my love story, what is the beginning of yours?