I collected love stories from readers over the last week. There were too many to fit in one column, so here are some of the best. (Stay tuned for more on Sunday)

Barnes and Noble romance
I met my husband at Barnes and Noble in Leawood, Kansas. He was a Café Manager, and I was a young nursing student attending a local nursing school in the area. According to him, he tried to catch my attention all night while I buried my nose in my nursing textbooks. According to me, I was completely aware of what he was doing and tried to appear as nonchalant as possible, a move that led him to believe I was either deaf or completely engrossed in my studies, neither of which was the case. I returned to the store pretty frequently and eventually had the courage to talk to him. He and I soon discovered we had much in common, including running. He and I spent much of our courtship running the trails around Kansas City, including the Plaza where numerous fountains decorate the landscape. It was a beautiful time for us and was a great way for us to get to know each other as one's 'true colors' tend to come out after about mile 10. We hammered out our plans and planned our future as we sweat in the summer heat on those running trails. I ultimately persuaded him to come check out my home state of Alaska during the beautiful month of June. Of course, he fell immediately in love with the state and was primed to eventually make the move with me back up here after I completed my studies. After I graduated, I moved back to Alaska to begin my nursing career. He joined me several months later and eventually proposed to me inside his small apartment in Spenard. We since have had two boys and share a very happy life together. We still run together, though not as often since we have young kids and now live where a treadmill is usually the better option to running on icy streets. I'll always remember those times though, and know that I could never have picked a better partner with whom to run through life.

Making a family

One year when my daughter was still very small, maybe two or almost two, I decided to make a romantic dinner for my husband on Valentines Day. I fed our baby girl early and she had her bath and was all tucked into bed by eight. At this time I lit the candles, put on some soft music and finished off the beautiful Lobster dinner I had all ready to broil. The salad was made, the bread warming in the oven and the champagne on ice. I was dressed in something nice and so was my husband. We sat down across the table from each other and everything was perfect. Just as we were unfolding our napkins we heard this little voice "I want some..." come softly and plaintively from our little girl's room. We looked at each other and smiled. Without saying a word, he went and picked her up and I moved her high chair over to the table. We set a place for her and our Valentines dinner was for three that year. After dinner, she went down like an angel and we had the rest of the evening together. We still, 20 years later cherish the sound of that little voice and the love she brought to us. Finally we were a real family.

A pick-up line that worked
At 32 years old, I wasn't looking for love when I went back to the small town in Minnesota for my 15th high school reunion -
But as soon as a saw the man who was later to become my husband, I was instantly smitten.
No, he wasn't one of my old classmates, but a transplant from South Dakota who was employed at one of the local banks.
He was at a golf course bar enjoying a beer after playing a round of golf with a classmate of mine when I arrived. Not wanting
to let him get away, I had to think of a good pick up line: "Excuse me, was it you that posed for the February issue of Playgirl magazine?"
He turned around with chocolate-brown eyes and said, "No, but if you think I could, maybe we should talk?"…. And we still find things to talk about nearly thirty years later.

A personal ad
”Dan and I (Patty) met through the ADN Sunday Singles ads in 1990. After months of corresponding via letters through the mail, we finally met. It felt as if we had known each other for a very long time. I guess you could say we got to know each others' hearts before we actually met in person. Our first date was a day spent horse-back riding on the backroads in Wasilla. It was at the end of that first day that we knew we were in love. I lived in Anchorage at the time, and Dan lived in Wasilla. We got together as much as we could on weekends, and usually spend our days horseback riding. I moved out to Wasilla in 1991 and we were married at our home in 1993. A few years ago we built our dream home on 40 acres and we have a wonderful life there with our three horses and two dachshunds.

Short engagement, long marriage
“My future wife and I met at Petaluma, California back in 1976, when we were both in advanced training for the Coast Guard. There was an average of one woman to every 79 men there. I started talking to her in the common lounge in the barracks and when I walked her to her room, asked her out. She told me she already had a date, but I should ask again, then she asked me what my name was! I forgot to introduce myself! When I told her, she said, "So you're Walter!" Her roommate and one of my classmates, who I had been trying to get to go out with me told her about me. A couple of days later, she went with me for a ride to the shore to watch the sunset. Two days later, I asked her to marry me and she surprisingly said "Yes." We got married 6 weeks from the day we met. It has been a fantastic 33 years of fun, tears, joy, three children, five grandchildren, and I will never regret having asked and thank God for her answer. Oh, yeah, the guy she had the date with and couldn't go out with me was supposed to go out with her that next weekend...boy was he surprised to find out she had gotten engaged.

Learning to live
“I had a chance encounter last summer at the anchor that lasted for a few minutes. A dashing young man came up and asked to dance. I was almost immediately pulled away by my friends leaving him with my number. He called me a few days later and I was hesitant to return his call. I finally did and was invited to his home in the valley. I didn’t know what to think but I went out there and it was the most romantic night of my life thus far. He already knew what I liked to eat and made me dinner. He then took me on a motorcycle ride out by Eklutna. He took me up this rickety old stair case and we climbed on top of a water tower. The sun was just beginning to set and we could see the entire watershed of the valley. It was breath taking. We looked into each others’ eyes and I knew he would have a special place in my heart. Since that night we have had some wild adventures together and have grown to love each other deeply. He has shown me how to throw pottery, play video games, and most importantly how to live.”

Waiting for perfect timing
“We are newly-weds. But we met in 1981. We worked with troubled teens in Oregon at a social service agency when we were 26. He was hired to start up the Alaska site and was planning to relocate there in a few months. He was involved with another woman, but we had a magical connection. Being a good man he stayed with her. One night 28 years later -with both of us divorced, both a little battle worn from love- in some kind of cosmic moment I googled his name--and it came right up . He was still living in Alaska. I emailed him. He answered right away. We had both given up hope of ever finding true love. We fell right back into an easy conversation--sometimes for four solid hours at a time! We married nine months later in my mother's nursing home room in Kansas(she was very ill and I wanted her to see me married before she died --it was the hardest won but happiest day of our lives,”

An airport proposal

“John, who I call Jay, and I met very briefly at a dance in the spring of 2006. He was a Marine stationed out of 29 Palms,CA and the brother of a good friend of mine. We exchanged hellos and that was about it and then a few months later he was deployed to Iraq. I wasn't a year out of high school yet and attending UAA while biding my time applying to other colleges.
The news came just 10 weeks after his deployment: Jay had been injured when a remotely detonated I.E.D. went off under the HUMVEE he was driving and had seriously injured him. He would spend 9 weeks as an in-patient at Bethesda Naval Medical Base recovering from his injuries and a life threatening infection. In Febuary of 2007 he came to Alaska on convalescent leave to recover at his family's home. Over the coming weeks I would see him in church every Sunday sitting alone and then he would be gone for several weeks back to Bethesda for doctors appointments or surgeries. July of 2007 I was accepted to the University of Utah and just two weeks after my acceptance I received word that my department had been closed. This meant I wouldn't be leaving in just a month as I had planned. A week later Jay had returned from one of his Bethesda trips and we both were at a church dance. He had been quite shy since coming home. Well, dark and brooding may be a better description.
For whatever reason I felt compelled to strike up a conversation with this lonely but somewhat frightening young man. Over the next few weeks (August of 2007) Jay and I went on just two dates (in between his trips to Bethesda) and were smitten with each other and became an official couple. By October we began talking about marriage.
On December 21, 2007 I went with Jay's family to welcome him home at the airport from another trip back East. At the bottom of the escalator in front of the polar bear in the glass I met Jay and was curious as he dropped his bags, his coat, even his cane, and knelt down in front of me. In front of an airport full of people he took a small box from his pocket with the most beautiful ring you've ever seen. All I can remember is being amazed at how quickly he could get down on that bad leg and back up again and the cheer that went up from the crowd when I said "Yes!"
If I had gone to school and if Jay hadn't been injured we would have never met. I would have been in Utah and he would have continued along in the Marine Corps. We were married on August 8, 2008 and were blessed with a beautiful baby girl on June 20, 2009, just a day before her daddy's birthday. It's hard to believe that only a year and a half has gone by since we were married. It seems like we've known each other all our lives. In a distant country across the sea in just one moment in 2006 this all might never have happened. Instead, it brought two souls together. Jay lived, we love and every day is a gift from God.

Late life love
We meet at a poetry event, me reading, he in the audience. He comes up after (noteworthy, because in all the years I did poetry slam, no one ever came up to chat after), tells me he’s doing an on-line literary journal, wants my poem, wants to give me his recently published book of poetry, which I don’t want because I’m leaving, I’m selling my books, I’m selling my house, and heading south to Mexico. He suggests I could help out with the journal from Mexico, thanks to email, reading submissions. I’m interested.
And so not interested, since I’m leaving. But a friend says I have to contact him since there’s a spark here I haven’t felt in years. I say no, really, I don’t even want the damn book, let alone a long distance relationship, let alone a short one, no.
I cave to my friend’s insistence, send an innocuous email after first getting the lowdown on him from another friend and Googling until I’m sure I have the right person. Nine days later – nine days! (yeah, he’s really interested), I get an email: “Yes.” But our schedules turn into weeks of postponements until by the time I’m driving to his house for wine and book, I’m asking myself the whole way across town why I’m going for a book I don’t even want. Well, fine, I’m good with the wine, whatever.
Eight hours of exquisiteconversation later, my postmenopausal trajectory, reignited, flies off course. Oh, and did I mention exquisite kisses? With a combined age of 120, we embark on a totally unexpected (and unconventional) journey together. Geezer love rocks!

A wrong number that went right
“I was sitting in my living room in the summer of 1977 when the phone rang. A woman's voice asked for someone who did not live there and I said she had the wrong number. She apologized and hung up. Moments later the phone rang again and it was the same voice asking for the same name and I responded that she still had the wrong number.
Another apology and we hung up. A minute later the phone rang and again the same voice asked for the same name. This time we talked for an hour and a half, after which I asked her for a date, to which she agreed. T and I had a successful blind, but not deaf, date and saw each other casually for several years before eventually loosing touch. A week before I was to be married a couple of years later, T called me out of the blue. I said I'd love to see her under other circumstances, but I was getting married soon. Twelve years later after I became divorced from my wife I went to see T where she worked, only to find that she was getting married soon. Clearly, we had a bad timing issue. Over the next sixteen years we would occasionally run into each other, but we both were still involved with current relationships and nothing came of those chance encounters. Last summer it had been six years since I had last seen T and I was wondering about her. A friend of mine casually mentioned that she had done some business at the place where T worked, not knowing anything about my friendship with or knowledge of her. I asked if she had had contact with any certain person there and she said yes, it was a Miss T. Well I'll be damned I said, she is the love of my life. The very next day I went to her workplace to see her and found out that she was indeed single now. The timing problem had corrected itself and now we are in a committed and loving relationship. I always had a good feeling about us, it just took time and patience for it all to work out.”

A ferry romance
I moved from Seattle to Alaska in October of 2007, the majority of my trip spent on the ferry system.

We’ve been together pretty much ever since and I’m grateful every day to have met such an amazing person! A photo of the very first day we met on the ferry can be found on a bookshelf in our livingroom.

Elderberry Park proposal
In February of 2007, I was in a small, but infuriating quandary. I had vowed that I would propose to my lady love as soon as I had successfully paid off the pile of debt that I accumulated during the three years that I had been working in retail, and that month I had written the checks that zeroed out my credit card balances, bought me clear title to my car and eliminated a few other bills. The proposal was due and I didn’t have a good place for it.
I lived in a house with a roommate that afforded little privacy outside of my bedroom, which was NOT going to be the place where I popped the question. In fact, there was no place at either of our homes that measured up to my standards of an appropriately romantic setting. I didn’t want to go to a fancy restaurant, since that would have telegraphed my intent and ruined the surprise. But I couldn’t go to a fast food place, since that would not be a good setting for a proposal. I knew of a lovely spot that would have worked, but it was outdoors, covered in snow, and this was February. I was disinclined to wait until May.
I even asked a few friends for ideas, but nothing seemed right, and I was getting a little cranky about it.
But one night, as I was driving my love home for the evening, we saw a beautiful sight: a sliver of a crescent moon, golden and very large, just approaching the western horizon.
Inspired, I suggested that we should immediately go somewhere where we would get a good view, and my lady agreed. We drove to Elderberry Park, a place we were generally fond of anyway. By the time we got there, we were just able to glimpse the moon as it slipped down behind the mountains and vanished. But by now, I knew that fate had answered my need.
This late on a winter night, the park was, naturally, deserted, and therefore our privacy was assured. I steered her toward a bench, insisting that we sit down until the very last trace of moonlight was gone. She sat on the bench, but I, instead, knelt in the snow beside it, and asked that burning question.
A lovely place, a romantic moon, and a genuine surprise – it was the perfect romantic moment.