Ah sweet love! —Tricia McGill

 

Find this and all my other books on my BWL Author page

While going back over long forgotten posts I came across one I wrote ages ago. Because I write Romances and am a glutton for happy ever after endings, of course I tend to look at life through those rose-tinted specs, even though I know that in real life only a small percentage of love affairs end in that happy ever after. 

Love comes in many guises of course. In my life I’ve known all about abiding love. The kind that comes with having a loving family around you—and the kind that comes with having true and trusted friends. Most importantly, the kind that comes with having a long and contented marriage with a steady, dependable man. My late husband was my best friend. He knew things about me no one else did, even my family—it was he who encouraged me to follow my dreams when I began to write. Each form of love brings a certain amount of heartache of course and has varying degrees of laughter and tears attached. I know I’ve been blessed, as some people know no love at all in their entire barren lifetime.

Let’s face it, love as sung about in most songs, is a fleeting and fragile thing. Where would Country or Pop singers have enough to write about without the heartache brought on by losing a lover. I likely chose romance as my choice of genre because of my smugness in having known such enduring love. True love as experienced by two people of whatever gender is a wonderful thing. Fate, Destiny, my Guardian Angel, call her what you will, has been more than kind to me. She’s always guided me to take the best and most rewarding fork in the road as I meander through these pathways of life. 

   

As for friends, I’ve been so lucky in my life as I’ve always had friends around me that I can depend on. I have friends back in England that I only hear from now and then, and some have been steady for many years. Friends have come and gone in different stages of my life. I have long-time friends who live interstate or up country that I catch up with rarely these days, but they still remain firm friends.

Some cynics say there is no such thing as a platonic friendship between a man and woman, but I personally think this not entirely true. Some of my best friends over the years have been male, and truth be told I have always liked the company of these platonic ones. I like how men’s minds work (well the part that is understandable to a mere female). They have such a different way of looking at life to us females—more uncomplicated I always feel. And they take such pleasure in the simple things—such as absconding to their shed or workroom to potter about for hours doing who knows what. They don’t care if the dishes are left in the sink or if the bed is unmade at three in the afternoon, there’s more important things in life.

Then there’s my super cyber friends—some of whom live in far flung corners of the world and I will never get to meet them face to face. But they are also constant, some having been a guide in helping me through varying parts of my writing career, providing assistance and advice that helped me on the way to becoming better at my craft. I’ve always considered myself a simple story-teller, following my heart rather than my head, but without the advice gained via this wonderful world of the internet where would any of us be today.

Love Lock Bridges

 

Available at Books We Love

           

The other morning on my Google feed I found an article about the Old Red Bridge, which I wouldn’t have thought at all interesting except it is a love lock bridge. And it is in – what, this can’t be right – Kansas City? That’s less than five miles from where I live.

            The first time I heard about “love locks” bridges was during my trip to Paris five years ago. The Pont des Arts or Passerelle des Arts is a pedestrian bridge in Paris which crosses the River Seine. It links the Institut de France and the central square (cour carrée) of the Palais du Louvre. For years, lovers come to the bridge and profess their undying love by locking a padlock to the bridge, sometimes with their names engraved, sometimes with other poetic messages. Then they would throw the key into the River Seine. Unfortunately because over 700,000 locks have been secured to the bridge, with an additional 7,500 every year, the bridge cannot handle the weight. So in 2015, the grilles were removed and replaced with glass panels so locks couldn’t be attached. When I was there, metal grilles were again in place but separate from the structural part of the bridge.

Pont des Arts in Paris

 My picture looks rather forlorn as I seemed to have captured a day when love was just not in the air. At one time, sections of grille and boxes of locks were auctioned off, so even if your lock no longer appears on the bridge, it may be out in the universe somewhere standing guard over someone else’s love, or perhaps it has been melted down to become part of another artist’s representation of love.

Although Paris is known as the city of love, it is not actually the origin of this loving tradition. The first notion of love locks appeared in a poem titled “Prayer for Love” by Desanka Maksimovic, a Serbian poet. The poem takes place before the First World War and is about a soldier and young woman who were madly in love and secretly met every night at the Most Ljubavi Bridge in a town called Vrnjačka Banja. When the young soldier was sent off to Greece, he eventually met the love of his life. When his first love found out, she died of heartbreak. Out of superstition, local women started hanging love locks on that same bridge, the Bridge of Love, in an attempt to safeguard their love.

The popularity of love locking really took off after the release of the Italian movie “Ho Voglia di Te” (I want you) in 2007. It was inspired by the same-named novel from Italian author Federico Moccia, which was published in 2006. One scene features the protagonists locking their love by attaching a padlock to a lamppost at the Ponte Milvo in Rome and throwing the key into the Tiber River.

I began to think there had to be more to the tradition than just these two incidents – a poem and a story, so I researched and found a link to twenty love lock bridges, of which not all are actual bridges. 20 Love Locks Bridges Around the World (brides.com) Some are sculptures, others are trees and yes, some are bridges. They all appear to be inspired by the original poem or movie. There are other internet sites that list numerous places in the United States with love lock bridges, sculptures and places of tradition, none of which have much of a history, except perhaps for the people who live there. Places like Loveland, CO use the idea as a promotion of its town and name.

I wonder at the significance
 of a combination lock.

But what I did not find was information on the one particular love lock bridge that had appeared on my Google feed just this morning – Old Red Bridge, in my own back yard. So back to the original reason for my research. Although the original Red Bridge was built in 1859 by a Scottsman, it was wood and was replaced twice over the years. Then in 2011, the New Red Bridge opened, so the previous one became called the Old Red Bridge (because they are both painted red, of course). It was designated as a love locks bridge in 2013, so its “history” isn’t even as old as that of many others around the country.

One significant difference is that after locking in their everlasting love to some appropriate spot on the bridge, people are requested to put their keys in a designated box instead of throwing them into the Blue River. The metal from the keys is bad for the environment, especially the fish. Instead, these keys will be used by the organization Monarchs on the Move to create a sculpture of the iconic Monarch Butterfly that travels through Kansas City on its amazing multi-generational migration. That’s a rather romantic notion, don’t you think?

           

For wonderful romantic reads, visit my page at Books We Love. Be sure to sign up before February 12 for a chance to win one of the luxury spa packages!

 

Love to all,

Barb

http://www.authorsden.com/barbarajbaldwin

https://bookswelove.net/baldwin-barbara/