My sweetheart gave me roses for Valentine’s Day. It’s soppy. It’s traditional. It’s the first time he’s done that in the nearly seventeen years we’ve been married.

My husband, you see, is a foodie. Anything big, chocolate, red and edible is his first choice for a gift. This year I again wanted roses. I finally got them. The wonderful flower, with its juicy red color and terrific scent, is called a Freedom Rose.

In the evening we went to an intimate restaurant in Tiburon, Calif. From our table in the window I could see the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge punching through the haze that hugged the shoreline. There were few sailboats out on the bay. The wind was absolutely still.

On an outcropping of rock below us, a man was showing a boy how to fish. Their pole dipped. The boy reeled in a crab. They let it go, and left soon afterward. Later in the evening, a man arrived with his two children and a crab basket. They lined the basket with bait and heaved it over the side of the cliff. I’m sure they had good luck.

The evening was memorable for many reasons. Not the least of them was the realization that we hadn’t eaten in a restaurant since September 2009. What with all the tumult after my breast cancer diagnosis, the surgeries and recoveries, the chemotherapy and--along with that--the admonition to stay away from crowds, we hadn’t eaten out in four-and-a-half months. That’s a long time, especially for a pair of foodies.