A few thoughts on love
As I sat at our kitchen counter last weekend, bits of red construction paper slowly floating down to the floor, I started thinking about the traditions of Valentine’s Day, and all the things I had forgotten, now that I’m ‘grown up’.
Did you make your own Valentines when you were a kid? I did. I labored over some of them, and gave others the amount of attention they required. The fancier ones were for my friends, and maybe a boy I had a crush on at the time. No one else in the class ever made their Valentines, and mine would sit in the piles, odd and overlooked as kids searched for the coolest store bought cards in their loot.
I remember always being afraid that someone would forget me.
In high school, it was cards from boys in the mail, boys who went to boarding schools and came to our school dances and wrote impassioned letters in the meantime. As an independent woman on my own, dates for Valentine’s Day came and went–I remember one Valentine’s, my closest girlfriend and I went to this crazy Middle Eastern bar and sat on poufs and drank beer and entertained the proprietor (who was the source of the crazy). As a married woman, it became a marker to hit, a ritual to complete so the ‘love’ and ‘do something nice’ columns were checked off.
Today? If I never got another Valentine from anyone, I would not care one whit. But over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring the rituals of love–with how-to’s for those who still make their own Valentines!.
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