How do I love thee?

Last night Laura and I went to our local bookstore (which she says should be called Books-a-Hundred because they never have what we want), looking for something I needed for my poetry class (and no, I didn’t find it). We were just running in for a minute, because we also had to stop by Target for a quick errand and then still get home for bedtime, so I kept her with me instead of letting her lose in the kid section, from which it is really quite difficult to pry her when it’s time to go. She’s leafing through something like 100 Best Love Poems while I look for my book and look over her shoulder at the same time to make sure she hasn’t wandered into an erotica chapter, should the book have one. She settled after a while on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, a “A Man’s Requirement”—although it seems to me it was titled “A Gentleman’s Requirement” in the collection she was reading. She finishes reading the poem and starts looking in the pages just before and after for a minute.

“What are you looking for?”

“Where’s the poem about the lady’s requirements?” she says.

I still start laughing thinking about it. Now Barrett Browning had, in my opinion, quite a radical streak, and I didn’t read that particular poem closely myself, so aside from Aurora Leigh, maybe there is such a poem. Right then, though, I had to explain to Laura that I wasn’t laughing at her, but at how happy it makes me that she can read Barrett Browning and then look for what she might have to say about how she expects to be loved herself.