I stood in the kitchen, surrounded by power strips and wire fragments, frustrated that we were on our second crew of electricians trying to recreate the masterpiece of under cabinet power and lighting that had worked perfectly the first time around. More frustrating still, we were rebuilding a kitchen that had been only 8 years old before a tree crashed through our house.

As this tall electrician told me he’d lived in Annapolis for decades and that since his divorce he was sharing a townhouse with a friend, I had a flashback.

About 30 years before, I was single, living in my first house in a 1950s post-war neighborhood with sidewalks. My next-door neighbors had become good friends. And across the street, Dot, the amazing 89-year-old who mowed her own lawn, had died. Dot was one of the original owners who had met me on the sidewalk when I was moving in with a big smile and a tray of lemonade and orange cream wafer cookies. Her nephew had split her double lot and sold the house and the vacant lot separately. Another single woman, Nell, had bought the house, and we hadn’t yet met the new owner of the empty lot. Dot’s pale pink roses were raging in bloom on the empty lot.

My next-door neighbor was lively and practical and she suggested that something needed to be done with the roses before they were bulldozed to make room for the new house. “Dot would hate to think of them going to waste,” I added. The next thing I knew, my next-door neighbor and a mutual friend of ours and I had met Nell, and the four of us were cutting armfuls of roses before the new owner of the vacant lot showed up.

We raided sheds for buckets as there were more roses than we’d imagined. After lots of laughter, Nell invited us into her new house, and we had some wine, with our buckets of roses spread around her not-yet-furnished living room. We toured the house, talked about where to hang her art, what brought her to Annapolis, our mutual connections, and how much we liked the neighborhood. After a glass or two, her handsome electrician walked through with his screw gun down by his crotch and gunned it. After he walked out, we all giggled.

And here he was standing before me, still tall and slightly bow-legged, divorced, and not as handsome as he had been 30 years before. As he continued to talk, I decided not to tell him that we’d met before.

We called him John Michael Patrick Francis because he had a Catholic double first name. He became the footnote to that lovely afternoon that we came to call Wine, Women, and Roses. I suspect he would have liked to think he’d been the star of the story.

He wasn’t.

After what he’d just told me, I didn’t think he’d appreciate knowing he wasn’t the leading man, but the footnote.

And I really needed him to get the under-cabinet lighting right this time.