I Wish I Could Remember

I Wish I Could Remember

When I was about thirteen, I attended a spend-the-night party at the home of a girlfriend.  Her older sister was having another party upstairs, so we “children” were relegated to the downstairs with stern warnings that we were not to invade the gilded festivities taking place up above.  Naturally, when all the “big” kids arrived that night, we “little” ones gathered together to peek out the door at the top of the staircase in order to observe this elusive world so vociferously denied to us, the world of those so much more sophisticated and grand than we.  So there I was, lying on my tummy with my long hair in pink curlers and my underwear in the ice box (why did we ever think that was funny?), peering out at the “big kids”with all my “little” friends.  This would be an unremarkable event in my life if it were not for the fact that upstairs that night, with all the cosmopolitan ones, was The Songwriter.  How utterly horrified he would have been if he’d known his future wife was spying on him from the middle of a pack of giggling girls just behind the staircase door.

We were best friends for seven years before we married.  And truth be told, we don’t really remember the first time we met.  It seems we were always there.  While the romantic in me would love a wildly dramatic story of our first meeting,
 I'll gladly take the friendship for the happy life it afforded us.

  But this poem by Christina Rossetti resonates with me on this Valentine’s Day. 

 I hope you love it as much as I and I hope you’ll share your first meeting stories with me!
Wishing everyone a Lovely Valentine's Day.

 I Wish I Could Remember

I wish I could remember that first day,

    First hour, first moment of your meeting me,

    If bright or dim the season, it might be

Summer or Winter for aught I can say;

So unrecorded did it slip away,

    So blind was I to see and to foresee,

    So dull to mark the budding of my tree

That would not blossom yet for many a May.

If only I could recollect it, such

    A day of days! I let it come and go

    As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;

It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;

If only now I could recall that touch,

    First touch of hand in hand – Did one but know!

Christina Rossetti