Love is elusive, like the first fireflies on a June night. If you can catch some in an old peach jar and secure the lid, they will illuminate the glass with their dusty glow. Like love, they may burn softly, but they will burn throughout the night.

Love whispers when it is trying to say the most important things. It is shy at the beginning, waiting to make the perfect entrance. But love is like the elephant in the room. There is no way to acknowledge it subtly, gracefully. Always, it reveals itself in a clumsy movement that belies its bigness.

Once you know love, it never leaves you, though its object may fade into the past. It is easy to remember the suffusing warmth of an old love – honey-sunshine that embraces your shoulders, a gossamer shawl. Always, in remembering, you forget the sunburn and chapped lips that followed its saturating heat.

Like silver, love may be tempered and it may tarnish, but it can always be polished until it gleams again.

Love is solid, like a winding wall made of stones. When it finally begins to crack, it crumbles from the foundation upwards. But despite the wear of weather and time, the beauty in such a material is its resilience; the stones can always be reclaimed from the field where they fell.

Love is ephemeral, like the hush of a hawk’s wing slicing through the winter air. It swirls like gypsy skirts in the dark and flickers like silk in the shadows of a fire. It is wild, an electrical storm in August, the sweltering month.

Some of the breathlessness of love is perpetual. When the plane takes off and your stomach drops, leaving you to catch your breath, this is the feeling of being in love. If you have never been in a plane before, the feeling is jarring. It shakes your senses awake as you realize you are hurtling into the blue abyss, relying on somebody else for safety. Once you are familiar with the sensation, it is less of a shock to your body. There may not be an adrenaline rush or a quickening of pulse, but the exhilarating inward gasp as the plane lifts into the sky will remain.

Still, love is not always wild. It grows into the patient discovery of habits. At first, you may find you are allured by your lover’s charm. But if you take time to learn him, you will find he is not always charming. He will sleep only between flannel sheets in the winter, but keeps two fans always blowing to make sure the air is not still. If you love him, you will accept the fans, even though their drone keeps you awake. Perhaps your lover was, at first, seduced by your fragile grace. But if he takes time to learn you, he will find you are not always dainty. He will see you at lunchtime, eating a tomato whole, like an apple. He will learn you do not always wash the strawberries before you indulge in their sweetness. If he loves you, he will learn to savor the taste of the earth on the strawberries, even if it makes him wince.
This is the nature of love.