On that very first Valentine’s Day, he gave me flowers. That may not seem remarkable, but it was.
It was six years ago now. I was a thirtysomething woman, single, teaching in Toronto and trying to recover from a broken heart after the end of a long-term relationship.
A big city can be surprisingly lonely. Throughout a glorious summer, I found myself in a sea of people. There I was running among them, eating beside them, dancing crushed between them, and yet I still felt alone.
In a rut, I decided to take a risk. I left the secondary school where I was teaching and my incredulous students, packed a backpack and a pair of Birkenstocks, and set off for two years in post-apartheid Africa. In a tiny village in the desert of Namibia, I taught high-school English and trained teachers. I discovered men, women and children who had been denied access to education, political action and social freedoms because of the colour of their skin. My search for Mr. Right fell by the wayside in light of their stories and their dreams.
My social life in Africa suited me well. I spent many evenings chasing goats and donkeys away from my little house, or sitting in the backyard chatting with women cooking over open pits under a fire-red African sunset. I wasn’t looking for love, but as the old adage reminds us, love finds us when we are least expecting it.
I met a man on the road to Namibia. Our paths collided in a departure lounge in South Africa as we prepared for the last leg of the trip into Namibia. We were part of a group of teachers from all over the world working for a common NGO. When we parted to travel to our individual placements, I was happy that a friendly British man would be living about 40 minutes from me.
As we began to settle into a routine in our own villages, Dan’s centrally located house became the meeting place for us volunteers dotted all over the northern border between Namibia and Angola. Far from the clubs and pastimes of our home cities, we spent many Saturdays reading epic novels (we had the time) in whatever shade we could find.
Without the distraction of a TV, we played chess and cards, listened to our eclectic library of CDs and had countless irrational conversations about what we would do if we could suction away the sand for a day. We revelled in trips to Namibia’s Etosha National Park, where lions, elephants and giraffes wander regally across a land no humans have dared to claim as their own.
In time, Dan and I became more than just two teachers connected by our shared experience in an extreme environment. We discovered that we were both hopeless volleyball players in sand (or on any other surface for that matter), that we both dreamed of a hot shower, a cold day and for a pizza delivery man to appear on the desert’s horizon. Most surprisingly, we discovered that our roots both originated in a small fishing village on the northern coastline of England. In the most unexpected place, as far from my comfort zone as could be imagined, I was beginning to find home.
With a backdrop of Africa, you can imagine that every date was romantic. Sitting on the top of Dune 45, one of the oldest dunes in the Namibian desert, we experienced a previously unknown silence. There were days when we danced wildly with our neighbours in the lanes of our village as the first rains fell on a land yearning for water, and there were memorable nights spent under piercing African stars as children sang out in unison to the night sky.
But my favourite memory is of our first Valentine’s Day, six months after we had moved to the desert. When you live in a world of sand, your eyes ache from looking out at a vast sea of beige while the relentless sun glares down on a land without shadows. You begin to dream of colour, of vegetation, of green grass and most of all of the flowers that are so readily accessible around Valentine’s back home.
On Valentine’s night, I made my way to Dan’s house on the back of a truck overloaded with crates of beer and the odd chicken. Dan and I were volunteers, so we didn’t have much money. We lived in sand, so there wasn’t much hope of keeping our clothes pristine. The environment was harsh, so we had no nice outfits to put on. We met at Dan’s door looking a bit ragged for the most romantic night of the year.
Then the door swung wide. Sand stretched out behind me, but before me were 200 handmade paper flowers hanging by thread from the ceiling of the living room, an upside-down garden of roses for my eyes to wander through.
I like to joke that my now-husband and father of my two sons didn’t have much competition for my affection. My only suitors seemed to be runaway goats, donkeys and Dan. I could never catch the goats or donkeys – so that left him.
But when a man somehow finds tissue paper and piping in a tiny village in the desert and makes a much longed for gift of it all, the choice is clear. A few store-bought posies would never do it for me again. He gave me flowers, in February, in a world where flowers can’t easily be found. He offered a feast for my weary eyes, and no gift ever meant more – before or since.
Dawn Ruddick lives in London, Ont.
