Valentine’s Day is a celebrated with Valentine greeting cards… thanks in part to a 19th-century student of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Leslie Fields is head of special collections at Mount Holyoke. She says Esther Howland, mother of the modern valentine, was one of the school’s first graduates….in 1847.
Last year, right around this time of year, Northampton based writer Linda McCullough Moore, reported from the front lines in the war against yet-one-more Valentine’s day alone, bemoaning the sad and soppy state of singlehood at the courageous age of 67, complete with a 17-point list of the basic characteristics of the man she thought she sought. And this year?
I found him. Or, he found me. The man I had in mind. No, not strolling down Main Street in Northampton, but in a small, somewhat bizarre hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. Two minutes into our first conversation, he exclaimed, “I just read your book.”
“So you’re the one,” I said.
In my experience, people who read your books imagine that they know you, as though you were just calling it fiction for fun.
This particular reader of mine immediately texted his friend back home in New York who Googled my name, resurrected my wish list from the commentary last Valentine’s Day and texted him back to say we two were a match made in heaven, or at the very least on public radio.
And she was right. This man, was exactly, I mean precisely, down to his serious love of Trinitarian theology and Girlyman, and his avowed aversion to rhubarb and John Updike, the very amalgam of my wish list, made up of equal parts of kindness and hilarity, warmth and world-class brilliance, not to mention having a well-honed devotion to solitude. (I love a man who understands I very often do not want to see him.)
I spent the next months awe-stricken at having met the one person on the planet with whom I shared 99.9 percent of my interests. He was, he is, a most amazing man. I loved him. He loved me. It was a pure and decided pleasure, start to finish.
Yes, finish.
I should say, I can see you, you know.
You, there, moving closer to your radio, turning down the volume of your life, hoping I will tell you why a thing that was so wonderful could ever end. I can only tell you what I know at 68 that I did not know at 67: Shared interests are not everything.
This lovely man who wanted to take care of me had not the slightest interest in taking care of himself. Diets, exercise, doctors — not for him. I told him if he loved me, he’d change. He told me if I I loved him, I would accept him as he is. But nobody changed and nobody accepted. We parted best of friends.
Now Valentine’s Day is coming round again and so, like everybody else, we play the game, knowing even in the bottom of the 9th inning with two outs, and the worst batter in the history of the world on deck, there’s still a chance of finding love.
There’s another storm bound for New England this weekend, but – for most – there’s a break in the snow today. That’s opened up a window of opportunity for the busiest folks on Valentine’s Day.
It’s been kind of a nerve-racking week for Kate Annichiarico.
“You plan and plan and plan for this holiday, but the weather’s the one thing you can’t control,” Annichiarico says. “You think, ‘Okay, if it could just come on Wednesday, it could all be cleaned up by Friday.'”
No such luck for this owner of Mount Williams Greenhouses in North Adams, Massachusetts. But Annichiarico says most people are understanding about delivery delays – and some offer to pick up instead.
“It hasn’t been quite the nightmare I thought it was going to be,” Annichiarico says.
Over in the lower Pioneer Valley, Angela Grout owns Agawam Flower Shop. She says the snow got cleaned up just in time for her trucks to hit the road.
“The biggest issue were running into is sometimes people aren’t home, and it’s a little too cold to leave them at the door,” Grout says. “So we have to kind of find a little backup for that.”
Of course, Grout says, cold February 14ths aren’t unique to this year.
And she planned ahead in case schools were closed – and many are – getting back-up addresses for those teacher-bound bouquets.
From what she can see, single men and women—especially of a certain age— are expected to betray no interest whatsoever in romance, says commentator Linda McCullough Moore. At 67, Moore, a writer in western Massachusetts, disagrees. “… we do pretend, but left to our own devices, as we are—more than is likely good—we troll senior dating websites, emailing, chatting on the phone, imagining if a man is conversant with both Gertrude Stein and Ignatius Loyola, he might be someone fun to bowl with, someone to come running next time a squirrel falls down the chimney.”