Art & Artillery

“Oh, boy, you don’t know how fast time goes by until you get there.”

Frank Sheeran

Linda Rose is an East Coast girl. Briny Atlantic air smells like home and the shores of Calf Pasture Beach was her childhood playground. Picnics with her dapper mustached father Leo and her always proper mother were the stuff of her upbringing.

These days, she gazes at pictures of beaches and hums along to Elvis Presly tunes in the overstuffed leather chair of a memory care unit in Mesa, Arizona. Her hair has grown out a bit and is soft and almost blonde. She wear comfortable pajama pants, a matching cotton shirt, and a leopard spotted sweater from her days as one of Utah’s top Realtors.

She’s happy. That’s what matters.

She asks about her husband sometimes, and wonders why he hasn’t come to take her out to see a movie and get a donut at their favorite place. She likes those dates and is always surprised by them. Linda knows he’ll come for her. He sends beautiful flowers that her friends, the other ladies sitting near by eye with envy. The note on the flowers has her name, and the arrangements always include roses, so she knows they’re for her.

An only child in an Italian-American household, she was doted upon and protected. Leo was a union organizer, working with Jimmy Hoffa to make America a better place and make sure the men who built it got a fair shake. Her petit mother and name sake Rose, was the consummate 1950s housewife. Lovely dresses and stocking, adorned with a simple strand of pearls made up her daily uniform, as she cooked and kept house.

Linda wasn’t allowed to work until she was 16, and then only at the local drugstore, where her father was friends with the owner. She graduated school and went off to college at the University of Connecticut, and then into the world. A study abroad in Munich, Germany opened her eyes to the world, the wonders of travel, and took her far afield from the protective bubble her parents had worked hard to maintain.

Once back in the states, Linda was charged by a professor with a deep French accent several years her senior, who promised more knowledge of the wide world. George and her married and soon after her first daughter, Zoe Lara Kara arrived into the world.

A family necessitated a better income, and so he took a position across the country at the University of Utah in the foreign language department. A fresh start and a long road trip later, the young family was settled in Salt Lake. Linda Rose still had dreams of travel and excitement, but a toddler put a pause on those dreams. The professor, also was not ready for a settled domestic life, and felt himself at liberty to pursue another lady without such attachments.

Linda Rose, was in love, but also not a fool. She sent George and his new girlfriend packing and prepared to make her life in this new city as a single mother. She began a career helping people find housing at the Rental Gallery, a first step on her lifelong career as a Real Estate agent.