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February — Beyond the Hallmark Cards and Candy Hearts
Collective Reading Group
Love is in the air, or so all the commercials and storefront windows say. It’s Valentine’s Week, spelled out in glittery letters and scripted on candy hearts and teddy bears — a commercial festival of grand gestures, overpriced roses, and affection wrapped in cellophane and plastic.
Then there is the understated — the long, quiet love that doesn’t need roses or reservations. The kind found in morning rituals, in a hand reaching for yours without thinking, in the abiding steadiness of presence through years and seasons.
Love that lingers in the small, unspoken moments: a cup of coffee made just the way you like it, the warmth of memories of a shared journey.
It isn’t flashy. It isn’t scripted. But it is real.
And, as Margaret Atwood suggests in “Variations on the Word Love,” the commercial packaging of this human emotion reduces something vast and uncontainable into a four-letter word, stripped of its depth and complexity.
This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters,
too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
