A tribute to Valentines Day: On love lost and found

February has always been one of my favorite months. We have gotten through a gray January, which always seems so hard.

Christmas is over, you have taken down your decorations and things look dull. You’ve made a list of intentions you know you won’t keep. The rest of the bills from your Christmas spending have come back to face you.

And then there’s learning to write a new year on everything. When February arrives you can enjoy winter for winter’s sake, knowing that spring is just around the corner, rehearsing in the wings.

February is also a month that honors many things like Black History month, President Abraham Lincoln and President George Washington’s birthdays (and those extra days off from work), and then there is Valentine’s Day l’amour, l’amour, and my own birthday.

Now let me get serious about this great economic booster, Valentines Day.

Christmas being over, all retailers can use the boost by now. Just in card purchases alone — if you include money spent by children for each other and teachers along with the more romantic versions sold — about $1 billion is spent in the United States each year..

Of course the e-cards available via the internet has had an effect on card buying, which is kind of sad . Give me a real card anytime, one I can hold on to and look at again as years go by.

I still have the cards Ron sent me over the years and they are precious to me. Now of course the post office benefits a smidge as well, and it needs all the help it can get.

Candy! What a great word. Back in 1868 in Britain, Cadbury made the first fancy heart shaped box of candy and the rest has been history and calories.

Stores all over Los Banos hope you will buy cards and candy from them. Flowers! Jewelry! Dinner OUT! All are wonderful Valentine’s traditions and wonderful tax makers in town.

Now to feelings. Love transcends time. It dresses itself differently in various roles over our lifetime. As a child we thought of Valentine’s Day as another party, infusing it with all the enthusiasm and imagination that only a child can.

We gave cute cards that had cute designs and cute messages to our equally cute friends. We decorated shoe boxes as mail boxes and gave each other conversation hearts and heart shaped lollipops.

The only type of love we knew then was for our family. We “liked” our friends, but the deeper romantic love comes later, we are told, when we are older. If we are lucky.

In our anxious teen years we feel a strong replica of love, which can come and go like the tides. True love, however you define it and how Valentines cards hallow it, usually enters more subtly, until it overwhelms.

A simple test for love might be if you find you would rather give to this person then receive. You wish for them more goodness than for yourself.

Life makes more sense with this person in it, you feel more complete, and even when apart you can still feel the touch of your beloved’s hand.

I have learned that even after death, true love is forever. If Valentine’s Day had not been conceived hundreds of years ago , surely someone would have created it just out of the compulsion to shout about their feelings.

Valentine’s Day can be a wonderful day, a sad day, an angry day or an empty day, depending on which part of life’s roller coaster you are on at the moment.

I believe there should be another set-aside day, a sort of Anti-Valentines Day for those who have no current boyfriend or girlfriend, no husband or wife. A day set aside for the divorced, jilted or recently widowed. No balloons or cards required. Just lots of chocolate, kleenex and a good tear jerker movie will suffice.

I have known most of those stages myself, and perhaps the sad ones made the good ones sweeter.

When My first husband left me after 17 years of marriage I almost hissed every time I saw a Valentine’s Day-based commercial. I was pretty venomous.

Yet for those 17 years I was a great fan of the day and gave a lot of thought each year about how to outdo the years before. And they were sweet days, and in retrospect, worth the later pain ( plus I gained three great children).

Later on, the excitement, the power of finding myself in love again almost knocked me off my feet. And I treated this marriage, this love, with extra care because I knew that it could be lost.

When Ron died after 30 years of a truly loving marriage, I thought my heart had indeed been broken. For years Valentine’s Day was a bittersweet mixture of precious memories and dire downs.

Then, when I later met Grover, a completely unique and different type of man and relationship, I shook my head. The Valentine God must laugh at us humans, reminding us that we can be surprised at any time.

A person can fall in love again, at any age, and each is its own story.

On Valentine’s Day I always think of the couples who to me are the perfect example of love, like Barbara and Louis Parreria.

Talk about timeless love! Henry and Helen Mellos, June and Emil Erreca and Eilleen and Alan Sorensen always come to my mind.

Recent widows and widowers, Sherry Pearon, Jean Willis, Harvey Torres, all can relate to that feeling; part of themselves is gone but still present.

I know I still feel that way. What a wonderful thing love is.

A complex emotion able to adjust to so many relationships; husbands, wives, parents, children, siblings, friends, pets…..a popuurii of love.

Valentine’s Day is usually meant for that one man or woman who completes you and makes you wonder, how did I ever get so lucky.?

For those fortunate enough to have that love, enjoy it! For those who miss it, you never know what tomorrow may bring.

And for those who have had it, and lost it, remember, it’s better to have loved, and lost, than never to have loved at all.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

This story was originally published February 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.