My Valentines

A couple weeks ago I showed you the small piece that I made to use on my Valentines this year. You can see it here. Here are the finished Valentines, ready to be put into envelopes along with our letter. Ray came home from the Post Office and said, "Look at the cool stamps that I got for the Valentines." They are cool. They are Gee's Bend quilts. The family picture on the letter was taken at Thanksgiving with the turkey. (and I don't mean Ray—or Andy—har, har!) I just realized I published a very similar picture a year ago.

The mailing list changes a little every year. Sad to say, people die, they move and don't send their new address, they cross us off their list or we just lose track. Seems like sometimes the person you worked with and ate lunch with every day drifts away after you or they leave the job and intentions to "get together" never materialize and then the Christmas cards stop and there isn't much point in sending a Valentine. There are some people, well one anyway, that I never hear from, but I keep sending the Valentines to. She's not good at communicating, but I still feel a connection.

Lots of people seem to dislike form letters with Christmas cards (or in our case, our Valentine) but I enjoy getting them from other people and I still send mine. I try not to be braggy or enumerate all our purchases of the past year, as some folks seem to do, as in "When Jr. was accepted to Harvard we were afraid we wouldn't be able to afford the new sailboat, but then Roger was promoted to V.P. of marketing and his bonus turned out to be exactly what the boat cost!" Blah, blah, blah. I try to stick to things that people might be interested in reading.

It also seems like every few years lately we have gone to a family reunion where either Ray or I have reconnected with a long lost cousin and they get added to the Valentine list. It is interesting to me that for years we lost track of cousins, or seldom saw them. As we get older we all enjoy getting together again. I remember how much my parents enjoyed reconnecting with their cousins in their later years. Someone once said that the older you get the more you value people who knew you when you were a child. That would be mostly siblings and cousins and it rings true for me.