Squirrel Fever

“Lord, David, you talk ‘bout love like it a hole. Somethin’ you can fall in and out of.”
“Isn’t it?”
“…That ain’t love at all, just squirrel fever. Just a storm of emotions…. Man sees a pretty skirt and calls it love. Most women folk ain’t much smarter. Give more credence to butterflies than friendship. Real love ain’t that way. It’s more like a tree or plant or somethin’.”
“How is that?”
“Grows if you take mind of it. But it takes work and sacrifices. No one stand back of a neglected tree and watch it die and say, ‘Guess that tree just ain’t suppose to live.’ Only a fool would talk like that. But people do it all the time with their loves.”

from “A Glass Sliver” in The Letter by Richard Paul Evans, pp. 107-8