The
Nature Of Romance
According to
the dictionary, the word “romance” is defined as “an emotional attraction or
aura attached to a specific era, activity, adventure, or individual”. This is, succinctly put, why I am enamored of
the genre and why I write it. I have an
emotional attraction to romance and all that it symbolizes. I enjoy the aura of romance. I find it everywhere.
Romance
embraces all the facets that come together to make the story. People, place, and circumstance are woven
together to form the fabric of each specific story. I write about romance in a small town because
small town life fascinates me. I was
born and grew up in the same small town where my father was born and grew
up. The air there fairly crackled with
romance. Around every corner there were
stories that would break your heart, curl your hair, make you laugh, or warm
your soul. To this day I could drive you
down the streets of that town and tell you a story worth telling about the
people who live in every house we would pass.
Some of the stories are generations long, some only vignettes, but all
of these stories attest to the same fact.
Ordinary life in a quiet, small town is anything but ordinary or quiet.
I live in a
small town now, not far from where I was born, and about the same size. The romance quotient is the same. The things that happen in the daily life of a
population of 3,000 are astounding.
Nothing gets lost in a small town.
The stories of individuals live on in family lore, in town records, on
grave stones, in the very architecture of the buildings. In a small town, somebody can always help you
find what you're looking for, from your car keys to your true love.
When I
examine the fabric of these romances, woven of linen circumstance, woolen
places, and silken love, the one aspect that seems to stand out most clearly to
me is the fact that there are no coincidences.
The trite phrase, “things happen for a reason” is proven over and over
again. When I was growing up, a woman in
town pined for a baby. She and her
husband were still childless after ten years and it was breaking her heart. Then, her younger sister had an affair with a
married man and became pregnant. The
pregnancy was kept “secret” and the baby was “adopted” by the childless
sister. Everybody knew the
circumstances. Nobody judged. The married man succeeded in obtaining a
divorce, rare in those days. He married
the younger sister and they subsequently had two children together. Meanwhile, the childless sister raised her
niece as her own daughter. The girl grew
up, married, had multiple children and formed a veritable real estate
dynasty. The childless sister had the
big family she and her husband had always dreamed of.
Another
story is of the wife of the local mailman.
Because of her personal religious beliefs, she had one baby after
another, even at the risk of her own life.
After the birth of the tenth child, her husband contracted the mumps and
became sterile. Nobody in town doubted
for a nanosecond that it was divine intervention. The mother raised her children, and went back
to school herself. She ended up with a
doctorate in history and went on to become head of Archives at the state university. That's a romance!
This is the
foundation upon which my Small Town Girl series is based. I write about the triumph of true love and of
dreams coming true. I write about people
who discover themselves in their heritage, who overcome daily struggles to
forge a decent, even flourishing, quality of life in often overlooked and
unlikely places. I write about the real
people who will never be on television, but contribute every day of their lives
in quiet, dependable, and even heroic ways.
I write about self-discovery without self-centeredness.
The Small
Town Girl series is a narrative embracing the nature of romance, the resiliency
and resourcefulness of the human spirit, and the power of love that is ongoing
and thriving in our own back yards. Picket
fences and all
No comments:
Post a Comment