February: The Luuuuuuv Month

Ah, February: the Month of Luuuuuuv. Well do I remember my St. V days of yore. The third-grade Valentine's eve I stayed up all night making little construction paper hearts with sticks of Juicy Fruit glued to them for every kid in my class. Twenty-six. Which, when you factor in little blunt-nosed elementary-school cutless scissors and dried up bottles of paste, factors out to 3.25 billion. But really, I cut and pasted and trimmed and wrote and signed and delivered for just one kid. A boy named Mark. Curly red hair. Smart. Funny. Worshipped from afar. *sigh* 

And then there was the year in High School that I lived in terror of the school's Secret Valentine program in which one could give one's own true love an anonymous heart shaped cookie. Or, for those truly madly deeply in anonymous love, a rose.

I feared and trembled, knowing I was going to get a Secret Valentine from him. The boy who followed me daily to my locker and stood against a post, gazing at me. Unabashedly. Unblinkingly. Creepily. Just . . . stared. I had no idea who he was, but christened him "Limpid Eyes" to my friends. That's what his peepers were when he looked at me: limpid.

The boy threw their limpidness at me in math, where he stared from across the room. Then his eyes got whiplash turning to stare at me once I got the teacher to change the seating chart and made sure I was far behind him. Once again they strained their limpidity in the halls where he seemed to find every possible way to pass through my class schedule. 

I believe this is now called "Stalking."

In the years following High School, V-Day was sort of on-again off-again with me. I never had a boyfriend, but still, over the years I managed to be the recipient of a few single roses, bouquets, milkshakes, candy bars, a bracelet, and in one particularly brave move, a pair of pink pantyhose with a line of hearts down the sides. I hearty-heart-hearted those babies. 

When I got married I figured St. V's day was locked-in. My hub had to give me stuff, right? It's in the contract. And most of the time the dude has done all right with his Romantic Husband office. (We'll just forget the years he joined a non-profit whose off-site meetings cluelessly fell over Valentine's Day. Until the wives and significant others made the men sleep on the couch. Then, shaZAM! Dates changed.) I've received enough roses and chocolates over the years to festoon several small cruise ships.

In the end, though, none of this matters. Because it all comes down to one thing: After twenty-five years we still like each other most days. I still think he's cute, and he still sees echoes of my old chickie-babeness. 

In this world, I'll take that.

Plus two-dozen long-stemmed roses hovering over a giant (GIANT) box of fine chocolates.