The Park Bench- The First Kiss

I thought this was such a wonderful romantic story about a bench

I have one of these old benches in my garden. Mine is really in bad shape ( it came with the house when we bought it- maybe ,tomorrow I will make a trip to Lowe's, buy new slates and a can of black spray paint and give my bench a new life. Come to think of it I have a bench like this one in miniature size.

When my husband & I were first dating, we went on a walk around my sister’s neighborhood (I was staying with her at the time). A few streets away, there was a large house on a corner lot that had a park bench situated right next to the side walk and it was just begging us to stop and sit. Neil & I obliged and ended up having our first kiss on that bench.

Fast forward. Neil & I are married. It is Valentine’s Day and it’s an extra snowy winter. I come home from work, open the door to our little apartment and see an old, weathered park bench sitting in our living room. I was so confused. After asking Neil about it, I learned that he had been driving around my sister’s neighborhood each day after work for the past two weeks, trying to find the house with our bench again. It had been quite awhile since our first kiss by this point, and given that the city was blanketed in tons of snow, it made locating the bench very difficult.

He finally found the house and knocked on the door and asked the homeowner if he could buy their bench. The woman was a little confused and told him that he could buy park benches at any major hardware store. He went on to explain why he wanted to buy her bench. The woman thought that was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard and called her daughter on the phone to tell her what Neil was doing. She let Neil take the bench free-of-charge. He loaded it up into our tiny Honda CRX, drove across town, dragged it up to our third-floor apartment, and even had a little plaque made for it that says, “First Kiss, July 1, 2002.”