Part 2

I sat there for a long time, the dust settling on the shoulders of my flannel shirt, holding that piece of paper like it was a holy relic. The silence in the attic was heavy, the kind of silence that feels like it’s holding its breath. Outside, the Ohio winter was doing what it always does in mid-February—painting the world in shades of slate and charcoal. The world outside was quiet and gray, a stark contrast to the explosion of color I knew was happening in the grocery store aisles just a few miles away.

Down there, in the town, people were rushing to buy bright red hearts and beautiful pink flowers. They were grabbing boxes of sweet chocolate and picking through racks of small cards with kind words. It’s a ritual we perform every year, millions of people around the world celebrating this day. But sitting there with my grandfather’s handwriting fading in the dim light, I began to wonder: Have we ever stopped to wonder why?. Why do we choose this specific day to celebrate love?. Is it just a modern holiday created by stores to sell candy?. Or is there something deeper, something much older?.

My grandfather, Frank, didn’t have chocolates in that prisoner of war camp. He didn’t have pink flowers. He had hunger. He had fear. And he had a memory of a woman back in Ohio that kept him alive. That’s when the history teacher in me—the part of me I thought I’d retired years ago—started to wake up.

I realized that the story of Valentine’s Day isn’t the story we tell our children. It is like a great mystery. It is a story that takes us back thousands of years. And fittingly for my grandfather, it is a story filled with Roman festivals, secret weddings, and brave heroes.

I closed my eyes and let the attic fade away. I traveled back in time. I walked through the streets of ancient Rome.

Imagine the city of Rome, 2,000 years ago. It isn’t the ruin we see today. The city is made of white stone and marble. The air smells of wood smoke and the dusty earth. It is the middle of February, but the people are not thinking about soft hearts or flowers. They are preparing for something visceral, something raw. They are preparing for a festival called Lupercalia.

This was an ancient Roman celebration , and let me tell you, it was very different from the Valentine’s Day we know today. In fact, it was quite wild.

I looked down at my grandfather’s letter. He wrote about the cold. He wrote about the uncertainty of whether he would ever see another spring. That was the essence of Lupercalia, too. The festival was held to honor the gods of nature and the founders of Rome. But more than that, during Lupercalia, people wanted to celebrate fertility.

Fertility is a word that means the ability to create new life. In a world without modern medicine, without grocery stores, where winter could kill you as easily as a sword, creating life was the most important thing. They wanted their crops to grow and their families to have healthy babies. It was a time of energy and movement, a desperate plea to the universe to let them survive another year.

I could almost see them. The Roman priests gathering at a sacred cave. They would perform rituals that seem very strange to us now. They believed these rituals would protect the city and make the land rich. It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t about holding hands over a candlelight dinner. It was about survival.

After the rituals, the young men would run through the streets. They would carry small pieces of leather. And here is where history gets uncomfortable for our modern sensibilities. They would gently tap women with these leather strips.

Why did they do this?. It wasn’t violence, not in their eyes. They believed it would help the women have children in the coming year. It was a day of hope for the future. My grandfather, sitting in his cell in 1945, was doing the same thing. He was hoping for a future. He was praying that he would get to have children, that he would get to have me.

There is also a legend about a lottery connected to this ancient time. Some stories say that young men would pick a woman’s name from a jar. These two people would be a pair for the rest of the festival. Think about that. Two strangers, thrown together by chance, by the luck of the draw. Sometimes they even fell in love and got married later.

Even in this wild, ancient festival, we see the beginning of something familiar. We see people coming together in pairs. We see a celebration happening in the middle of February. It was a time to welcome the spring and the return of life. It was not romantic in the way we think of romance today, but the seed was planted. The idea of pairing and new beginnings was already there.

But how did we get from men running through streets with leather strips to my grandfather writing a secret letter in a prison camp? How did this wild Roman festival change?. How did it become a day named after a saint?.

To find that answer, I had to look at the stories of the men named Valentine.

Who was the real Saint Valentine?. History is foggy here. It’s a difficult question because history tells us about several men with this name. But there is a common thread. All of them lived a long time ago, all of them were brave, and they all became symbols of love and faith.

The most famous story—the one that made my chest tighten as I sat in the attic—is about a priest named Valentine who lived in Rome.

At that time, the emperor was a man named Claudius II. Claudius was a hard man. He wasn’t interested in love or poetry. He wanted a very large and strong army for his wars.

This part of the story always hit home for me. My grandfather was a soldier. He was drafted. He didn’t have a choice. Claudius, this ancient emperor, had a theory. The emperor believed that single men made better soldiers. He thought that if a man had a wife and children, he would be afraid to die in battle. He thought love made men weak. He thought attachment made them cautious.

So, the emperor made a very strict law. He said that young men were not allowed to get married.

Can you imagine that?. To be told you cannot marry the person you love?. To be told that your government owns your life so completely that they can forbid the most human connection of all?

My grandfather had to delay his life for the war. But at least he knew that if he came back, the choice was his. The young men of Rome didn’t have that hope.

But Valentine… Valentine was different. He believed in the power of love. He thought the emperor’s law was wrong and unfair. He saw the young soldiers, terrified of dying alone, terrified of going into the dark without ever having been joined to another soul.

So, in the shadows of the night, Valentine performed secret weddings.

I pictured it. A small, candlelit room. The smell of incense covering the smell of fear. A young couple, holding hands so tight their knuckles turned white. Valentine, whispering the words, rushing through the ceremony before the guards walked by. He brought young couples together in front of God. He gave them hope and a future.

He was a rebel. We don’t think of St. Valentine as a rebel, do we? We think of a chubby little cupid. But the real man was a dissident. He broke the law for love.

But secret stories do not stay secret forever. Eventually, the emperor found out what Valentine was doing.

The punishment was swift. Valentine was arrested and thrown into a dark prison.

And here, the timelines of history and my own family merged in my mind. My grandfather in his Stalag, looking at the barbed wire. St. Valentine in his Roman dungeon, looking at the stone walls. Both of them prisoners. Both of them suffering because of the wars of powerful men.

There is another legend, a beautiful and tragic one, about Valentine’s time in that prison. It says that while Valentine was in prison, he met the jailer’s daughter.

The young girl was blind.

Valentine was a man of great faith and kindness. He didn’t become bitter. He didn’t hate the jailer who kept him locked up. Instead, he befriended the daughter. It is said that through his prayers, he healed her and gave her sight back.

Whether you believe in miracles or not isn’t the point. The point is the connection. The point is that even in the darkest place imaginable, love found a way to exist.

But this isn’t a fairy tale with a happy ending. Not for Valentine. He was sentenced to death.

Before he was executed, he wrote her a final note. He didn’t have a Hallmark card. He probably had a scrap of parchment and a piece of charcoal. He wrote a message of friendship and goodbye.

And he signed it: From Your Valentine.

Have you heard that phrase before?. We still use it today on our cards. We print it on millions of pieces of paper every February. “Be My Valentine.” “From Your Valentine.”

But when we write it, do we know what we are saying? We are quoting a man who was about to die for his beliefs. We are echoing a goodbye letter from a prison cell.

Whether these stories are completely true or just legends, they matter. They show us a man who is willing to die for love. They show us a man who believed that human connection is more important than cruel laws.

Valentine became a hero. He became a martyr, which is a person who dies for what they believe in. Because of his sacrifice, his name began to stand for something beautiful.

I looked back at my grandfather’s letter. He had written: “I don’t know if I’ll make it. But knowing you are waiting makes the hunger bearable.”

He was a martyr in his own way. He sacrificed his youth, his health, his peace of mind. And he did it for the people he loved back home.

As time moved forward, the world began to change. The Roman Empire became less powerful. Christianity began to grow and spread across Europe. The leaders of the early Christian church had a difficult task. They wanted people to follow the new religion, but they knew that people loved their old traditions.

The people still wanted to celebrate their ancient festivals, like Lupercalia. They still wanted that wild release in February. They still wanted to tap the women with leather strips and run through the streets.

So, the church did something very smart. They decided to give the old festivals a new meaning. They took the dates of pagan holidays and turned them into Christian holidays. Pagan is a word for the old religions that worshipped many gods of nature.

In the year 496, a man named Pope Gelasius made a big decision. He wanted to stop the wild rituals of Lupercalia. He declared that February 14th would be St. Valentine’s Day.

He wanted the people to focus on the saint instead of the old Roman gods. He wanted to replace the wild, chaotic fertility with the noble, sacrificial love of the martyr.

But at first, the day was very serious. It was a day to honor the memory of the martyr, St. Valentine. It was a day for prayer and going to church. It was not yet a day for flowers, chocolate, or romantic dates.

I thought about that transition. How we went from wild runners in the street, to solemn prayers in a church, to me sitting in an attic holding a letter.

Think about how history moves in small steps. The date was set, and the name was chosen. The old ideas of pairing from Lupercalia were still in people’s memories, but now they were connected to a Christian hero of love.

For several hundred years, February 14th remained a quiet religious day. It was a time to reflect on sacrifice and faith.

My grandfather’s generation understood sacrifice. They understood faith. They didn’t need a holiday to tell them that love was hard work. They lived it.

But the human heart always looks for joy. People still felt the coming of spring in the middle of February. They still felt the desire to express their feelings for one another. They were just waiting for the right moment for romance to bloom.

I shifted my weight on the floorboards. My knees were aching—a reminder that I am not the young man I used to be. I looked at the other letters in the box. Some were from later years. From the 1950s. The 1960s. The handwriting changed. The tone changed.

The danger faded.

When my grandfather came home, he married my grandmother. They didn’t have to hide in the shadows like the couples Valentine married. They didn’t have to worry about an emperor executing them. They built a house. They had babies. They bought cars. They lived the American Dream.

And slowly, the holiday changed for them too. It became about buying things. It became easier.

And that’s what haunts me.

We have taken a day that was born in blood and sacrifice—the blood of the goats in Lupercalia, the blood of St. Valentine on the executioner’s block—and we have turned it into something soft.

We send a text message. We buy a card that someone else wrote. We click a button and flowers appear at a door.

I’m not saying that’s bad. My grandmother loved the chocolates Frank bought her every year until he died. But holding his letter from the prison camp, I felt a strange sense of loss.

When love is easy, do we value it as much?

When we don’t have to risk arrest to get married, do we take our vows as seriously?

When we don’t have to write a letter on a scrap of paper knowing it might be the last thing we ever say, do our words carry the same weight?

My grandfather’s letter was short. He didn’t have much paper. Every word had to count. Every word was a lifeline.

“My dearest,” he wrote. “The nights are long. But I imagine your face, and the sun comes up.”

Simple. Powerful.

It would take a few more centuries and some famous poets to change the day again. To turn it from a religious observance into the romantic explosion we know. But sitting there, I felt stuck in the space between the martyr and the poet.

I wondered about my own love. My own letters.

I dug my hand deeper into the box. Underneath Frank’s war letters, there was a stack of blue envelopes. These were mine.

I remembered writing them. I remembered the girl I wrote them to. Martha.

But as I pulled them out, I realized something that made my heart stop. These weren’t letters I had sent. These were letters I had kept.

And among them was something else. A small, delicate card with lace edges. It looked like it was from another century, but I knew exactly when it was made.

The air in the attic suddenly felt very thin.

We think we know the history of things. We think we know the history of a holiday. We think we know the history of our own lives. But sometimes, you open a box, and you realize you only knew half the story.

The ancient Romans ran for luck. St. Valentine died for faith. My grandfather wrote for survival.

But what did I do?

I stared at the lace card. My hands started to shake, just like my grandfather’s must have shaken in 1945. Because I knew what was inside this specific envelope. And I knew that opening it would tear the scar tissue off a wound I thought had healed twenty years ago.

To be continued…

Part 3

I held the envelope in my hands. It wasn’t just paper; it was a ghost.

My fingers, thick with arthritis and age, trembled as they traced the edge of the card. It wasn’t one of those glossy, mass-produced cards you buy at the pharmacy for two dollars. It was heavy. It was textured. It was a piece of art that belonged in a museum, or perhaps, in the very specific museum of my own heart.

It was a lace card.

To understand why this card made my breath catch in my throat, you have to understand the history I spent forty years teaching to bored teenagers. You have to understand that before we had text messages, before we had factories churning out millions of identical greetings, we had the work of human hands.

I looked at the delicate white pattern glued to the front. It looked like a snowflake frozen in time.

In the history of Valentine’s Day, there is a specific moment when the world turned from the handwritten whisper to the beautiful object. It happened in the Victorian era. But looking at this card, my mind drifted further back first. It drifted back to the Middle Ages, to a time of brave knights, tall castles, and beautiful ladies.

I closed my eyes and leaned back against a stack of old National Geographics. I wasn’t in Ohio anymore. I was in a world of “courtly love”.

This was a concept I always struggled to explain to my students. They lived in a world of “swiping right” and instant gratification. But in the Middle Ages, love was a slow burn. It was a very polite and poetic kind of love. It wasn’t about grabbing what you wanted; it was about showing respect and giving beautiful gifts. It was about singing songs and writing poems for someone special.

I remembered when I first met Martha. It was 1968. I wasn’t a knight, and she wasn’t a lady in a high tower—she was a waitress at a diner on Main Street, and I was a terrified student teacher. But the feeling was the same. The terror. The reverence.

I remembered the famous English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. He played a big role in how we see this day. In one of his poems, The Parliament of Fowls, he wrote about how birds choose their mates on St. Valentine’s Day. He suggested that nature itself celebrates love in mid-February.

I remember standing outside that diner in February of 1968. It was freezing. The wind was cutting through my coat. But I looked at the trees, bare and stripped of leaves, and I saw a cardinal. A bright red bird against the gray sky. And I thought of Chaucer. I thought, if the birds are choosing their partners, perhaps we should too.

It was a romantic idea. It linked the religious day of the saint with the natural beauty of love. And standing there, watching Martha pour coffee through the window, I made my choice. I chose her.

But the card in my hand… this wasn’t from 1968. This was from later. Much later.

I carefully slid the card out of the envelope. The glue had yellowed, but the design was still intricate. It was an imitation of an Esther Howland card.

Esther Howland. Now there was a name that meant something to me. In America, in the 1800s, she was a young woman with a brilliant idea. She saw a beautiful, expensive card from England and thought, I can make something even better. She started a business in her home. She used beautiful lace, colorful pictures, and shiny gold paper. People called her the “Mother of the American Valentine”.

Martha loved that story. She loved the idea that a woman, sitting in her home, could create something that sparked joy in thousands of people.

But Martha didn’t buy this card from a store. As I looked closer, I saw the imperfections. The lace wasn’t paper lace from a factory. It was real lace. It was a piece of the tablecloth her mother had used for Sunday dinners. The “gold paper” wasn’t gold foil; it was a wrapper from a fancy chocolate bar I had bought her for our 25th anniversary, carefully flattened and cut into the shape of a heart.

She had made this.

And she had made it when she could barely see.

The tears that had been threatening to fall finally spilled over, hot and fast down my wrinkled cheeks.

You see, the story of St. Valentine has a legend about the jailer’s daughter. The legend says she was blind. And Valentine, through his faith and love, gave her sight back.

I couldn’t do that for Martha.

We were in our late fifties when the darkness started to come. It wasn’t sudden. It was a slow, stealing of the light. First, it was just needing brighter lamps to read. Then, it was not driving at night. Then, it was the faces of our grandchildren blurring into soft shapes.

The doctors gave it a long, complicated name. I just called it “The Thief.”

I remembered the anger I felt. I was a historian. I believed in learning from the past to fix the future. But there was no fixing this. I felt like Emperor Claudius—a hard man who wanted to control things, but who was powerless against the reality of life.

During those years, our home became a quiet place. The world outside was moving fast. The Industrial Revolution had long since turned into the Digital Revolution. The world was about to change again. People were sending emails. Kids were texting. The “Valentine Writers” books of the 1700s—those cheat sheets for love —were replaced by Google searches for “romantic quotes.”

But in our house, we went back in time. We went back to the handmade.

I became her eyes. I read to her. I read her the news. I read her the letters from our kids. I described the birds outside the window—referencing Chaucer every time, trying to make her smile. “Look, Martha, the birds are choosing their mates,” I would say, even though I was the only one looking.

But there was one thing I kept from her. One secret.

We didn’t have much money. Teachers didn’t make a fortune, and the medical bills were eating us alive. There was a trip we had planned for forty years. The “Grand Tour.” We were going to go to Europe. We were going to walk the streets of ancient Rome. We were going to visit the Tower of London where the Duke of Orléans wrote the first Valentine.

I had a savings account for it. It was our “Someday” money.

When the treatments got expensive—the specialists, the adaptive equipment, the things insurance wouldn’t cover—I drained the account. I sold the vintage Mustang I had been restoring in the garage. I sold my collection of first-edition history books.

I never told her. I told her the insurance covered it. I told her the car was just taking up space. I told her I was tired of dusting the books.

I thought I was being noble. I thought I was being like the knights of the Middle Ages, practicing “courtly love”—showing respect and giving gifts without asking for anything in return. I thought I was protecting her from the guilt.

I sat there in the attic, the lace card trembling in my hand. I opened it.

Inside, there was no printed verse. There was no “cheat sheet” poetry copied from a book.

There was only her handwriting.

It was shaky. It slanted wildly down the page, the letters crashing into each other. It was the handwriting of a woman who was writing by feel, by memory, in the dark.

My Dearest Arthur,

I know you think I can’t see.

I know the world has gone gray for me. I know I miss the bright red hearts and the pink flowers. I miss seeing your face.

But Arthur, you are a terrible liar.

I let out a wet, choked laugh in the empty attic.

I know about the car. I know about the books. I know about the ‘Someday’ account. I heard you on the phone with the bank. I heard the men come to take the car away while you thought I was sleeping.

You think you are hiding your sacrifice. You think you are protecting me.

You remind me of the stories you used to tell your students. You are like the Duke of Orléans, writing whispers on paper from his prison. You are trapped in the prison of your worry for me. You are lonely, even though I am right here.

But listen to me, my love.

The story of Valentine isn’t just about the priest. It’s about the connection. It’s about the shared need to connect with one another.

You didn’t need to take me to Rome. You didn’t need to show me the white stone and marble. You didn’t need to take me to the Tower of London.

You walked with me through the valley of the shadow. You were my eyes when mine failed. You were my brave hero.

History is not just about dates and names. It is about human feelings. And what I feel for you is bigger than any trip to Europe.

I made this card for you. It took me three weeks. I cut the lace by feel. I found the gold paper in your drawer—the wrapper from that chocolate bar you bought me. I know it’s messy. I know it’s not like the fancy cards Esther Howland made with her friends.

But it is real.

Valentine’s Day is a day of hope for the future. Even when the future is short.

Thank you for being my Valentine. Thank you for sacrificing for me. You are the man who believed that human connection is more important than anything else.

I love you.

—Martha.

I put the card down on my lap. I buried my face in my hands and I sobbed. I sobbed for the car I didn’t care about. I sobbed for the trip we never took. I sobbed for the woman who, even in her blindness, saw me more clearly than anyone else ever had.

She knew.

She had known the whole time.

And she had used the last of her failing sight, the last of her dexterity, to make me a Valentine. She had spent hours carefully cutting paper, just like the people in the 1700s. She had created a symbol of the time and effort she spent just for me.

It was a very intimate and personal experience reading that letter. I could smell the faint scent of her lavender perfume on the paper. I could feel the texture of the lace.

I realized then that the “mystery” of Valentine’s Day wasn’t a mystery at all.

Why do we celebrate it? Why do we care about a priest from 2,000 years ago?

It is because the human heart does not change.

We all have a deep need to be seen. We all have a deep need to be loved.

My grandfather in the prison camp needed to be seen. The Duke of Orléans needed to be seen. The Roman women running in the streets needed to be seen.

And I… the old history teacher in the attic… I needed to be seen.

And Martha had seen me.

She had seen the sacrifice. She had seen the love. She had seen the man behind the brave face.

The letter was a whisper on paper. But it roared in my ears like a symphony.

I looked around the attic. The shadows were getting longer. The gray light of February was fading into the dark of evening. But I didn’t feel cold anymore.

I felt connected.

I felt part of the long and winding road of history. I was part of the story of the priest who performed secret weddings. I was part of the story of the birds choosing their mates. I was part of the story of the millions of people who send cards to say “I love you”.

I picked up the lace card again. I traced the jagged, shaky letters of my name.

Arthur.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

The world outside was still busy buying chocolates and roses. Florists were selling millions of red roses just for this one day. Candy companies were selling their heart-shaped boxes.

Let them. Let them have the commercialization. Let them have the expensive dinners.

I had something better.

I had the truth.

I had the proof that love is a language that everyone speaks. It doesn’t matter if you are in a prison cell, or a Roman street, or a dusty attic in Ohio. We all understand the feeling of a beating heart.

Martha was gone. She had been gone for five years. But in that moment, she was more alive to me than she had been in a long time. She was right there, in the ink, in the lace, in the memory.

I carefully placed the card back into its envelope. I placed it on top of my grandfather’s letters.

Three generations of love. Three generations of struggle. Three generations of Valentines.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. I needed to go downstairs. I needed to call my daughter. I needed to tell her about this box. I needed to tell her that love isn’t just a day on the calendar.

But first, I sat for one more minute in the silence, letting the “small light in the middle of the dark winter” warm me.

We think we are so modern. We think we are so advanced with our phones and our internet. But when it comes down to it, we are all just looking for a piece of paper that says: You are important to me.

I found mine.

To be continued…