Nature's Valentine

Happy Valentine's Weekend!

Here's a natural valentine I spotted on one of my walks some time last year. I've been saving it for this day. A day late, I know, but we can celebrate love any day, can't we? As far as I know, nobody carved this heart in this tree. It just happened. A gift of nature. But then again, maybe a romantic squirrel chewed off the bark for his squirrel sweetheart. But however it got there, I thought it was neat. It's actually along the road in front of a neighbor's house and not too long ago, he cut it down. So alas, the heart is gone now, but we still have the picture.

I've always liked Valentine's Day. I used to be a room mother at the schools when my children were young, and Valentine's was my favorite holiday party. Every kid got cards and cupcakes. Of course, things might have been simpler then. Certainly, there weren't dozens of bouquets delivered to the schools for this or that sweetheart the way I've heard happens now. Just cute little cards with hearts and some of those heart shaped conversation hearts. Pure sugar, so naturally I liked them. The pink ones were definitely best. :) 

Some people say Valentine's Day can be sad when a person isn't part of a couple. It is nice to have somebody giving you flowers and candy. But I like to think of Valentine's Day as more than a day for sweethearts. It's a day to think about love in all its wonderful ways. A good day to share hugs with your kids and grandkids. Well, any day is a good day for that. It's a great time to share a special day out with a friend or to call your mother or a special aunt. It's a fine time to read 1 Corinthians 13 or 1 John 4 in the Bible. It's a good day to remember all the ways you are loved and to remember all the people you have loved even if some of them are no longer here with you. And if you don't have somebody to buy you flowers or candy, it's a perfect time to treat yourself to the flowers and candy you like best.

And it's a good time to share a crazy picture of a heart on a tree that made me feel some love for nature.

I do appreciate all of you who have volunteered to help me out with my upcoming book release. I am working to meet an editing deadline on a book and haven't had time to respond to each of you as yet. But I will next week. I've got all your names written down and I have to say you were like a special Valentine to me with your readiness to offer to help. Thank you so much. 

Now if you have any spare chocolate laying around, savor a few bites and enjoy the memory of a happy day.

Thanks for reading.

Valentines and Hearts

“Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.” – Voltaire 

What would life be without love? Isn't it great that we have a day set aside to celebrate love? In of all months, February. That month of the year when those of us in the northern hemisphere are beginning to be weary of winter. The month when the skies are often gray, when sometimes snow buries us and keeps us housebound. The month when you can schedule happenings, but you always have to wonder if those things will really happen on the day you plan or if old man winter will interfere. 

February is the shortest month because the good Lord realized that by this time in winter, we were ready to race on to spring. In fact it could be Jim Gaffigan has February figured out in his quote. "Without Valentine's Day, February would be... well, January."  So we can be glad for Valentine's Day.

The flower shops, greeting card companies, and candy makers are surely glad for Valentine's Day. Rose growers too. Roses will grace many desks and tables tomorrow. Red roses are the romantic choice. Chocolates in heart shaped boxes will be the language of love although I've always thought a sweetheart who knows your favorite candy bar and gets two or three of those instead has saved some money and yet scored some romantic points for knowing what his girl loves best. Chocolate covered strawberries will be the gift of choice in some households. And the restaurants will be busy. In a nearby town, a Waffle House even gets into the romantic mood with tablecloths and candles on the table and the servers dressed up for the night. 

But Valentine's Day isn't just for romantic couples. School kids get to have parties and candy. That was always my favorite party to help with when I was a room mother for my kids. Since all the kids got cards from everyone in the room, they could all feel popular on that day. Older folks who may have lost their spouses or perhaps were never married can appreciate a call or a card too. My thoughtful husband bought his 94 year old aunt an orchid. I know she'll love the flower and even more the visit when he delivers it to her.

Love puts the fun in together, the sad in apart, and the joy in a heart.  ~Author Unknown

So I'm wishing you a day when you have joy in your heart. A day when the memory of loves past or present will keep you smiling. A day when if no one brings you a flower or chocolate, you buy one for yourself. A day when you tell those you love that yes, you do love them. What makes you feel loved?

Now I need to get back to the edits on my book, Small Town Girl, scheduled for release in July. It has a lot of love in it. Love makes the stories go around. Thanks for reading. And remember a comment gets you another entry into my giveaway. I've enjoyed all your comments so far this month. 

 

A Day for Romance

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination. (Voltaire)

Happy Valentine's Day! What makes Valentine's Day good for you? Candy? Roses? A card with loving words? Maybe sugar candy hearts with "Be Mine" on them. Seems I remember hearing that they had jazzed up and modernized the Valentine messages on candy hearts. So now the sayings on the hearts are probably all shortened tweet-like love messages.

I like Valentine's Day. It's such fun to reach out to people with a smile and a love message. Romance can certainly be a writer's best friend. Romance stories have been popular since day one. Can't you just see Adam searching the Garden of Eden for the perfect flower to give Eve? And he surely had a fine choice before the serpent came along and started the ball rolling to mess up things. You can find lots of romance stories in the Bible. Jacob working fourteen years for Rachel. David falling into sin because he desired Bathsheba. Esther convincing the king to save her people.

We're wired for romance. Scientist are working on proving what we've always known. Romantic love, when it's right, makes us feel good. Releases all those good chemicals in our brain so that when people say we're on Cloud 9, they're not far wrong. We are sort of floating on air.

We like to read about people falling in love too and watch movies with great love stories. Romance sells books. Romance sells nearly everything. Gone with the Wind tells a dramatic Civil War story, but what do we remember? Rhett and Scarlett. We love a good love story. Some can be tragic. Think Titanic. Some happy ever after. Think Cinderella. And everything in between.

We yearn for romance in our own lives. We live it vicariously in the books we read and the movies we watch. So, most of us are eager to celebrate a day of romance on Valentine's Day. A lot of writers seem to be eager to celebrate romance every day of the year in the stories they write.

The last couple of weeks, I've been talking a lot about romance because my new book, Words Spoken True, is the most romantic story I've written for a while. But my story is hardly like D.H. Lawrence is describing romances here. "And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time."  

Always daisy-time. Not quite in most of my books. My characters have all kinds of obstacles to true love. They do get wet. They wave off the bugs and sometimes can't find a daisy anywhere. But their story gets told and now Adriane's and Blake's story is getting read.

Thank you so much for reading. And I wish you a Valentine's Day where all is smooth as a soft serve ice cream cone. Maybe we can keep it from melting too fast and dripping down our arm. A day to celebrate love shouldn't melt, but go on and on.

Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live.

The First Valentine

Hi, everybody. Hope you're not too stuffed with chocolate candy after Valentine's Day yesterday. Our preacher was telling us the origin of Valentine's Day in church today. Br. Fred says that back many moons ago, around 268 A.D. in the Roman Empire, it was decided that men should not marry before they entered the Roman army. But a priest named Valentine performed so many of the prohibited weddings that the Caesar had him imprisoned. Then legend has it that Valentine wrote his faithful congregation a letter from prison expressing his love for them and signed it "Your Valentine."

Not everybody agrees with this bit of Valentine history, so you can go out and do your research and make up your own mind, but I like the story. The day wasn't officially established until the end of the 5th century when Pope Celasius declared February 14 as Valentine's Day. However it was the 19th century before it became the custom to send flowers, candy and cards to the one you loved. I'm sort of glad they started sending the cards. I've always thought the Valentine's Day parties at elementary schools were the best. I still have a box of Valentines somewhere that my oldest son got when he was in third or fourth grade. It's a day when everybody can feel loved and popular.

Since we're talking about popular, I've heard from two people this week who say they have come back to overstuffed e-mail boxes. One, who was out of electricity and thus off line for eight days, said she had over 500 messages waiting in her inbox. Another who had been on a vacation came home to over 200 messages. Wow! Now that's a couple of popular girls. The neat thing was they both took time to read my newsletter I sent out a couple of weeks ago. I'm honored.

And now since we're talking about being honored, I just went out to get some information off the website for the Christian Book Expo where I'll be attending the Evangelical Christian Publishers' Association award banquet for Christian Book of 2009. In case you haven't been reading my other entries, The Outsider was chosen as one of the five finalists in fiction. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Any reason to repeat that, right? But I am excited.) Anyway when I get out there to the website, www.christianbookexpo.com, there's my picture right up there with all those famous authors on one of the pages, events I think. Imagine that!

But the really funny thing is that it's a picture one of my Sunday school kids took of me last year when we were hiking out here on the farm at Panther Rock. The kids love to go down there with me and I always take one picture like a portrait of them in the place of their choice to give to them later. So last year one of them wanted to take a picture of me. It's not a bad picture. I have my everyday clothes on and I've been hiking for a couple of miles with a bunch of teenagers who love to splash in the creek. So I'm not beauty parlor neat for sure. But I posted it on my website and I guess the Expo people must have lifted it from there. I can't wait to tell my Sunday School kid that his picture is out there on the web. He'll feel like a famous photographer. And I guess it's a good lesson for me. Be careful what you put out on the internet.

Of course I already knew that. Especially with e-mails. When you're writing a letter by hand, you have time to think about it while you're stuffing it in an envelope and putting it in the mailbox. If you've said some unwise things, your better judgement might kick in in time. Alas, with e-mails, they disappear in an eyeblink as soon as you hit that send button. Even while you're yelling, "Wait! Wait! Come back." So if you misspell words, if you sound off, if you moan and groan, you might want to take a deep breath and read it over again before you send it. I don't sound off (much) or moan and groan (only in my private journal) but I have sent out some misspelled words. And I hate that. Sometimes they are only typos, but there's no calling them back after you hit that send button. Thank goodness with the blog, it lets me edit if I see a mess up after I've hit the publish button.

What I really need to remember is that everybody messes up and the best part is that most readers of e-mails and blogs and newsletters forgive you for being human. Hope all your mess-ups this week are minor and something you can laugh about. One thing we can all count on is forgiveness if we seek it from the Lord.

Be Mine, Valentine!

Thanks to all of you who have responded to my newsletter. I always enjoy hearing from you and knowing that you're doing okay. And it's great to have you putting your name in the hat for my new book give-away, Hidden, an Amish romance, by Shelley Shepard Gray, and your choice of one of my books, Orchard of Hope, Summer of Joy, Angels at the Crossroads or The Outsider. To enter, all you need to do is go to my website and click on the contact link and send me an e-mail. I had said I was going to draw for the winner in April, but I think I'll change my mind and draw the winner earlier in March. That way I can give away something else in April.

Valentine's Day is coming for all you romantically minded readers. I like Valentine's Day. What's not to like? Valentines and chocolates and flowers and dinners out. I think the simple traditional gifts that don't put a strain on the budget are the best. The gifts that show the one you love that you know what kind of candy she likes best or what movie he's been wanting to see. The gift of attention and time. But sometimes those are the hardest gifts to give. We're all so busy trying to catch up and get it all done. What's going to happen when we get it all done? Well, a lot of it we'll just have to do all over again. So this Valentine's Day take some time to do something you enjoy. Pamper yourself and enjoy being with those you love. And don't you think the most romantic thing you've ever heard is where a couple reads a book aloud to one another? Ahh, romance!

Here's some Valentine's Day quotes to ponder while you're relaxing Saturday.

• Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939
• I don't understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine's Day. When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon. ~Author Unknown
• Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker. ~Author Unknown
• You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip. ~Jonathan Carroll, "Outside the Dog Museum"

Or maybe it would be better if both of you could sit down in the middle of the field and laugh together. That's the best thing to be able to do. Laugh together and share the joy.

For those of you wondering, the snow and ice are gone. Now we're having high winds and thunderstorms and tornado watches. Maybe next week it will be sunshiny and pleasant.

Hope you have a loving Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

This is one of my favorite holidays. For one thing, it's a great excuse to eat chocolate and I've had a sweet tooth ever since I can remember. But what I really like about the day is that it celebrates love. Romantic love for sure, but that's not all. We recognize love in all its forms. We get Valentines for our kids and moms and dads and grandkids and friends. When I used to be a Room Mother for my kids when they were in grade school, I liked the Valentine party best because all the kids got Valentines. You didn't have to be quicker than everybody else to get Easter eggs. You didn't have to worry about who drew your name at Christmas. You didn't have to dress up like a monster at Halloween. You just got to collect a Valentine from every kid in the class and have fun feeling loved and popular. Then you got to eat cupcakes and candy hearts with "Be Mine" stamped on them.

Love is a good thing to celebrate. One of the first verses a child learns in Sunday School is "God is love." One of the favorite chapters in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 13 -- all about love. We sing about love. "Yes, Jesus loves me." He loves you too. Let us be a reflection of that love on this Valentine's Day and throughout the year.

So here's wishing that you are surrounded and uplifted and overpowered with much love today and every day.

Blessings.