Wal-Mart always makes me cry....

When relationships fail, the individuals involved grieve the loss of the person as well as the many activities, songs, jokes, and what not that they shared. Little romantic gestures, pet names, a favourite show, a weekend getaway, all become tainted with the smell of loss.

For me, it's Wal-Mart.

Friday nights in this small town would see me and my husband at Wal-Mart, dressed in our finest Ozarks-backwoods outfits, cruising the aisles to restock on cat food, people food and what not.

We even brought along walkie talkies so we could keep track of one another in the store.

We would laugh at the people (who were likely laughing at us), marvel over the things we discovered that to that point we had somehow managed to live without, and generally check things out. My husband was inevitably drawn, like a mosquito to a fair-skinned arm, to the garden department. He would seek out plants that oddly managed to avoid being watered, and were relegated to the side to die out of the sight of customers. He would bring these poor, rejected, unloved beauties home, to nurture them and encourage them to their potential. It was amazing how these brown, diseased bits of flora thrived under his care, and repaid him with their exhibition of flowers, berries and leaves. His favourite was roses, and although I told him countless times that roses do not like our city's obscene temperature fluctuations and aridity, he persisted.

I have a lovely hedge of roses just out the window beside me, and rose bushes all around the house. A particular one, a red rose, blooms just outside this window. I notice the blooms each day and thank him for the flowers. Eternal blossoms. Roses everyday.

I tried going into Wal-Mart's garden department this season. I didn't make it as far as the roses or the half-baked bits of stem and leaves. I don't think I'll go back.