Ah, romance...

So a few days ago, the transportation reporter — who sits across the aisle from me in the newsroom — leaned over with a grin.

"Hey, Cathy! Your husband's been asking me about that new four-lane highway that'll run from Small-Town Arkansas to Big-City Arkansas."

He laughed. Evilly.

"You moving?"

I believe I've addressed this before, my husband's fascination with rural living.

He wants to live among the pine trees.

I want to live within 15 minutes of a Target.

You see the problem.

As a former country girl, I know of what I speak: Green Acres ain't the place for me.

But Hubs continues to romanticize himself into some weird Pa Ingalls alternate universe. Trust me, I am NOT Ma material. (If any woman ever was entitled to a life of wine, mood-enhancers and hourly cussing rants, it was Caroline of the Freaking Prairie. Poor soul.)

But I digress. Back to Hubs and his romance with all things rural.

It's difficult to fight fantasy. I tell Hubs the country is ... well ... isolated and lonely and inconvenient, and I might as well be telling a 12-year-old boy that the girlie-mag models he's gawking at are air-brushed and artificially boobed.

Of course, given that I spent many years — oh hell, OK, maybe a good decade — romanticizing men, I do feel a tad hypocritical.

I give you the One-Eyed Cowboy as my most perfect example.

The year was ... geez ... maybe 1996? Or 1995? Whenever. I spent most Saturday nights at a place called Cactus Moon. (Everything you're picturing? Yeah, that. You don't, however, have to visualize the tacky sheer black bodysuit I wore with jeans. Sorry.)

Anyway, I soon became obsessed with this one particular man. He wore a black hat. Wranglers. And a black rakish eye patch.

Oh, how I swooned each time he walked in.

And then, one night, my dear friend Mel (hi, Mel!), drunkenly ordered Pirate Man to dance with me.

Now, don't ask me how I had previously imagined that Pirate Man lost his eye (duel, maybe, over a woman?), but my daydreams certainly never included — a welding accident.

Yes, indeed. As it turned out, my pirate had owned a welding company that went bust (possibly due to an inability to wield the blowtorch?). He couldn't dance. Hell, he couldn't even stand up straight because he couldn't hold his booze either. And he got offended when I didn't recognize his family's name.

(Apparently they were Odessa, Texas, high society or some such thing, so while he didn't lose an eye in a sword fight, he did, at least, lose an inheritance. Heh.)

Harlequin, I owe all my most ridiculous teenage and early-20s fantasies to you.

So there you have it. My Hubs and I are the perfect couple.

He subsists on daydreams involving unpaved roads and roaming deer herds and I ... well ... I must confess to forcing him to don a pair of Wranglers every now and then...