Tanya Writes About Love on Valentine's Day

Okay, I admit it. I'm a sucker for romance. Duh. Who'd ever suspect that? I guess it started when I was little and my mom made little red heart-shaped jellos for dinner on February 14. The same little pans helped create heart-shaped cakes, and she'd stick ready-made pink sugar roses on top.

And in those days, regular schoolbox Valentines weren't pretty enough for your best friends. In Girl Scouts, we'd paste them on heart-shaped doilies before gifting.

And Daddy always brought Mom a giant box of See's chocolates which she readily shared with the family. What a treat to find in my lunchbox for the next few days a perfect piece of chocolate as my dessert. Back then,, Fifty Famous Fairy Tales was my second-favorite book after Little Women, Disneyland my favorite place to hang out.

Small wonder I now write romance. Sigh. Can't get any better than this.

Even still...I gotta confess the last three Valentine's Days in this house sort of sucked. That's a fact. Last year was the worst, with my hero suffering in chemo. The year before he had an routine but invasive and unpleasant medical procedure on this date. And the year before that, he had a knee rebuilt that he'd busted up chasing forest fires up mountains.

So we figured we deserved a real treat this year....even if it won't happen until February 22. On that night, we'll see a concert by one of our favorite country duos, Brooks and Dunn. We're going with wonderful friends and having dinner first. So it's all good; it's all worth waiting for.

And inbetween, we're having the grandbaby over on Valentine's Night for a heart-shaped pizza, so his mommy and daddy can have a date night all their own. Oh how I rmember the precious days when his daddy --our beautiful son as a little boy-- would sit at the miniature table in his room, pouring and pouring over the little bag of Valentines he'd gotten from his classmates.

So in the spirit of love and St. Valentine, I'll leave you with some quotes* to get you and yours in the mood.



Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
~~Aristotle

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~~ Lao Tzu

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to come extent, protects you from age.
~~Anais Nin

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
~~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
~~Nora Neale Hurston

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.
~~Vincent van Gogh

Love is life. All, everything that I undertand, I undertand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.
~~Leo Tolstoy

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
~~Albert Einstein

I'm a lucky one to have met my own personal hero with a love story a million pages long with a happy ending still in the works.

And I'm so thankful. God is love, after all.



*courtesy of History.com and gocityshopper.com