Lovers have placed padlocks on the Teschin Bridge in Odessa for decades, often on their wedding day.  After clasping the lock, they walk down to the shore of the Black Sea and toss their key into its waters.  Then they go home and do their best.  The locks remain, though, and are viewed by some as a testament to the permanence of the one feeling they hope won’t fade:  true love.

Being from Madison County, an area prone to linking unrealistic romance with bridges, I felt for the Ukrainians.

We rarely know where our feelings come from, we have little control over them while they are here, and all too often we wake up with no idea where they’ve gone.  We spend our breath, we cover the miles, and we devote our dollars to chase the unattainable.  Perhaps we damage love most by forcing on it our own definition of what it is supposed to look like.

In doing so, it’s not the lock that is symbolic.  It is the key.

Several stories exist concerning why the Teschin Bridge was constructed.  One of them states that a high ranking party leader lived on one side, and his mother in law lived on the other.  Every morning she would cook him pancakes, and every morning he would trek down the side of his ridge and up the side of hers to breakfast.

Some will reason he loved pancakes.  Some will reason hers were exceptional.  If reason is the goal, however, then I suspect neither he nor his wife could cook, and the price was right.

Even more realistic yet, I bet pancakes got old after awhile.  I bet burnt ones became more and more common.  Yet the husband continued for the same reason every husband does what he does not want to do:  his wife.

He chose it.  He chose it every day.  He chose it in spite of the pancakes her mother burnt.  Perhaps she threatened him every morning with a rolling pin, or perhaps he knew love was something more than a feeling.  It’s a choice, and every time he made it he clasped the lock again.