Mary J. McCoy-Dressel

Week 20: My Favorite Social Media Platforms, and why.
However…don’t expect that one.

I’ve missed two straight weeks, but I couldn’t allow myself to miss a third. This week’s topic is about my favorite social media platforms and why. You can find my social media icons in the sidebar. I wrote on a similar theme about my Social Media Hangouts during last year’s Marketing For Romance Writers 52-Week Blog Challenge.

However, my head isn’t into week twenty’s topic, so I’m using the theme from last week’s topic for Week nineteen. I’m a romance writer but I can’t drum up one of my most favorite romantic memories without digging into a bittersweet past. With that said, I did manage to bring up something that allows me to remember the good times without too much pain.

I’m doing Week 19: My Most Romantic Memory

I began writing about a time my second husband surprised me with tickets to see the Blue Man Group at Briar Street Theater and a weekend in Chicago a month after we were married. We didn’t have a honeymoon due to our work constraints. He grew up in Chicago, so the city has always been special to him. As I started writing about the trip, another memory came to the surface. In its own way, this memory turned out to be more romantic than the surprise tickets and weekend spent in Chicago, and it covered more than one night. Why does this memory stand out? Mainly, because it does allow me to “remember the good times.”

What I’m writing about today started before we were married and continued until he began driving on the day shift. Sometimes his trip took two days. Did I mention he was a truck driver? My asphalt cowboy? This won’t seem romantic to most reading this, but as I think back on those evenings, yeah, this was romantic to me. What triggered the new romantic memory? The night after we left the theater and the Blue Man Group performance, he took a roundabout way before going back to where we stayed. The reason? Keep reading…

Credit: Pixabay

Every night while on the road driving in and out of Chicago, he’d call me for traffic reports so I could check traffic maps and direct him away from the heaviest traffic areas back to the highway toward home or where he had to go from there–sometimes south, sometimes north into Wisconsin. I’d never been to Chicago before other than the airport. The night after the performance, he hopped on different highways and roads in the area where I would direct him so I could see in person what I’d only seen on maps.

While driving on his job, he’d call at random to describe the sights and sounds of the city to me, but I could only picture them in my head. So, the night we were in Chicago together, he wanted me to see for myself, the city skylines, downtown at night, real traffic congestion, the full moon coming up over the city… Things he’d only described to me on the phone each night.

However, I never did see the spooky shipping yards he’d deliver to. There were sunrise and sunset descriptions over another city I’d never been to, or a phone call to tell me three tornados swept past him on the road in Green Bay, or backups because of an accident, and blizzards, and the time his dashboard caught fire in Michigan. He even got hit by a train once before I knew him and had a lifelong back injury because of it. There were so many stories.

Sigh.

After his final load, I’d direct him on his way out of town. He’d call me again after he got out of the city, stopped to eat, and then headed home. During those long drives home in the wee hours of the night, magic happened between us. We talked about everything, covering our own childhood, our kids—his and mine, and our future.

One night on his way home, he called to inquire about the weird lights in the sky somewhere in Indiana before coming into Michigan. Turns out they were the Northern Lights. I put the dog on a lease and headed outside to investigate. I would’ve missed them if he hadn’t called and asked me to check online to see if I could find out what they were.

The early morning hour when he had arrived home, we stood embraced in the backyard watching a phenomenon we’d never seen before, and I haven’t seen since. They were only white swaying lights, not the pretty colored lights that make photos famous, but we didn’t care.

Anyway, to me, talking with him for hours on the way home was romantic in itself. Our conversations went in many different directions, and all I’ll say is there were some nights he couldn’t get home fast enough. This is a good place to bring this post to a close.

I don’t often show music videos on my blog anymore, but after writing this, I have to share a particular song. I swear, he reached down from Heaven and gave these words and this song to Jason Aldean to sing to remind me of the “good times” because they weren’t all good. This is why I call these memories bittersweet. Truly, he could’ve written these words for us right down to driving in Chicago and to my picture on the dashboard. (I have that picture now.) Ribbons in my hair, well, maybe they were really ribbons on the front of a nightgown…

Take a minute to remember the good times in life.

This is a blog hop as you all know. Let’s visit the other participating authors at the Marketing for Romance Writers Blog.

Thanks for reading!