Two or three times a month, the check-out desk of our local library is adorned with a splendid array of fresh flowers. Gorgeous flowers!
One day I asked Mrs. G if she would teach a class on how to love one’s husband. After all, she’s been married for 25 years, she’s raised 3 children, and she gets flowers 2 to 3 times monthly from her man. This woman is doing something right, and I want to know what it is.
Her reply was, “I can’t take the credit.”
She went on to explain that in the last year of her husband’s high school education, he had to complete another elective in order to graduate. He’d already taken shop and auto mechanics. He assessed his choices and picked Home Economics. Huh? A 17-year-old boy in early 1960s chooses Home Ec?
Well, his selection criterion was this: which teacher was the most pleasing to look at? The Home Economics teacher was a young single woman, fresh out of college. So he took Home Ec.
In addition to teaching her students to sew and cook and manage a household budget, she also trained the young ladies in the ways to best respect and support their future husbands. But there weren’t just young ladies in the class. So she taught the young man how to best love and admire his future wife. And one of the admonitions was to celebrate your wife regularly with flowers.
Twenty-five years later, Mrs. G receives flowers on her anniversary and her birthday. She receives a bouquet on the birthdays of each of her children with a note acknowledging all the effort she put toward raising them. Two or three times this year already, she’s gotten flowers…JUST BECAUSE!
We live in a small town. The home economics teacher still lives here; I think Mrs. G told me she lives in the Lutheran Home across town. What I do know is that Mrs. G properly thanked the teacher for the quality education her husband received.
So maybe Mrs. G won’t be giving a class. Instead, I think the class needs to be taught by my librarian’s husband!
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