From the moment I met June, I knew she was special.
It should have been just an ordinary day like a thousand of them that had gone before. I had put in my full day at the publishing company I worked at where my exalted title was Junior Editor which meant next to nothing. Our main gig was magazines and we published quite a few, some of which you would undoubtedly be familiar with as you surely read them with lackluster enthusiasm from cover to cover every time you were forced for whatever reason to visit your doctor. But I was not a Junior Editor on one of the half a dozen flagship publications we touted and advertised quite regularly on every billboard, bus and television show we could find coast to coast. No, I was a Junior Editor of the Lifestyle section in our vanity publication, Flowers and Gardening.
Thus when I walked home from my luxurious offices in lower Manhattan to my quaint if small apartment on the Upper East Side, I had developed the habit of avoiding any type of store or cart that sold, held, displayed or liked flowers. Flowers were my job so I did not need them in my personal life as well.
Walking to and from work was my idea of regular exercise since it was well over 100 blocks round trip. Do remember though that the walk to work then included an 8+ hour break until I walked home so it was not overly taxing. Speaking of which, when it snowed or rained extremely hard, I taxied it but being I was only a Junior Editor, I did have to watch my budget.
I shared my small one bedroom with a cat named Trish and nothing and no one else. I was not what I would consider a perennial bachelor; I just had not found the right woman to settle down with so I was still a perennial dater. But then came that fateful day in April, yes it was April, not June, when I met June.
It was a warm night and people were out enjoying it, remembering all too well the long cold nights of winter. Being outside in Manhattan at night is a privilege and so we tend to take advantage of it when we can. I was not in a hurry then to return to my small apartment and I knew Trish would not miss me overly much since I always made sure to fill her food dish every morning before I set off to work. June was standing at one of those stands that pop up on the sidewalks as soon as the weather breaks long enough that one assumes it will be a good 9 months, maybe longer, before we see snow in the city again. And usually I would have totally ignored June because, regrettably, she was selling posies.
For those of you not in the flower business or perhaps even those that are, posies are a small bouquet of flowers that were popular in the times before indoor plumbing and carried by the ladies to hold to their noses when the stench became overwhelming. June had set up a large cart full of them outside her flower shop, Flowers by June, which I had passed by probably a million times and never noticed. But this evening, for some unknown reason, one of the posies caught my eye. It was made of a lovely combination of purple and yellow flowers and I picked it up and turned to June, asking her the price.
She was exquisitely lovely. I noticed that right away. She had dark hair, the color of midnight that was cut neatly around her jaw line then curled slightly up. Her eyes were the shade of blue that you only believe exists in fairy tales until you see it in real life. Her skin was pale as the finest ivory. And her lips were painted the color of blood.
She told me the price and as I handed her the money she managed to slip in, "I am sure your girl will enjoy them."
