Saint Valentine’s Day

Over the years, I began to decorate a little for Valentine’s Day too.  I display a card my daughter gave me when she was five – her skeletal letters on my precious valentine, all different sizes and shapes; though the meaning is clear.  I am loved.  I place my red book of love poems on the coffee table; the one which still holds the handwritten note from a long vanished love that in the end, wasn’t meant to last.   I have loved.  Also on the table rests my favorite Grace Livingston Hill book, Crimson Roses, and a vintage Modern Priscilla magazine, the valentine number from 1918.  The cover girl is clutching a letter to post to her WW I soldier.  My emblems all nestle next to a pink crystal bowl filled with rosy foil-wrapped chocolates.

Last year I taught myself to knit hearts, red of course, and those hang from fishing cord on the lampshades.  A heart shaped wreath of roses graces the front door too.  These small things would never have taken away all the sting of being alone, but I know they would have made me smile.  And perchance to dream…those, the words of Shakespeare, a man who understood something of the yearning heart.

Now I have a valentine of my own and he’s no secret – just a sweet boy I knew many Saint Valentine’s Days ago when we shared an English Lit class in high school.  I love again.  Neither of us is much into exchanging the sentiments found in today’s modern greeting cards. But we do adore old movies…and chocolate layer cake.