My Valentine's Day Memories

So we don't do cards in my house. I have never seen the need to enhance Hallmark's financial status with inadequate poetry and tritisms scrawled on animated card stock. Instead, we make cards for each other.

Don't misunderstand me. These cards aren't pretty. They're usually done on torn-off squares of legal pads or printer paper and drawn with ink pen. Usually they have stick figures on them. And usually they are irreverently funny.

Yep. We make fun of each other. For example, this year my Valentine has a stick figure of a teenager at a computer in the bottom right hand corner on every page with the caption *click click clickety click whatever click*. She was not amused. I laughed until I cried.

It's been a good way to keep track of events that happen around here every day. Numerous little contretemps have been immortalized in our cards---fights with random co-workers years ago that now mean nothing, cats and kittens with habits, milestones, fights, make ups, back surgery----all remembered on little stacks of papers.

Last year, I went through my mother's papers after she died. I found all sorts of things among them, but most interesting to me were the cards. Even as a kid, I made cards for holidays.

She kept them. Kept them all.

I think I will too. I appreciate the sentiments (smartass as they are) of reality, and not some cardboard, mass-produced, obligatory cliche.'

Happy Valentine's Day. Click click clickety click whatever click.