Smitten with love for my mother, my father bought 50 penny valentines at a drug store while he was on a college basketball road trip. It was 1952, and before he took the court that night, he mailed this legion of little cards in a declaration of love that would last a lifetime. This was the beginning of a love story that emerges in surprising ways through the letters that my mother lovingly archived. She kept them in their original envelopes, secured them in groups with rubber bands, and labeled them: Letters from Basketball Road Trip, Letters from Basic Training, Letters from Chicago, Letters from Summer School/Masters, Letters from Summer School/PhD. Before my father was a serious writer, he wrote remarkable letters that chronicle astonishment and gratitude for his great fortune in meeting and marrying his beloved, Marcia Lee Zorn.

Many children struggle to see their parents as lovers. Some outright reject the notion, preferring to believe that the father who changes their oil and the mother who makes special birthday dinners began their “real lives” after they became parents. That is, they may insist on beginning their family stories with parenthood. Of course, we know that our parents met and dated, fell in love and married. But to think of them as lovers? This may seem too intimate, too human.

I confess that my journey through these letters has been fraught with a whole host of emotions. Mostly, I’ve cried as I’ve read the tender proclamations of a man who preferred “shall” instead of “will” in his early letters, who elevated his love language to Jane Austen heights and rivaled the ardency of a Mr. Darcy. In one of my father’s early letters to my mother, he closes with these lines of verse and this final comment:

I pray thee bear with me. I need you so
When you’re away, life’s river ceases to flow
Your warmth, your tenderness, I’ll love you my own
Till eternity’s ash replaces my bone.

Whatever may happen in the future, I’ll always remember you by that last verse. It is a tribute to the finest girl I know, and I’m only reluctant that I can’t portray it better. I am yours forever. Your husband, Don.

In other letters that followed throughout the years, he often closed with “I’ll love you my own/Till eternity’s ash replaces my bone.” My mom often remarked that my Dad really knew how to close a poem. I’d add that he really knew how to close a letter, too. Each letter became a Valentine in spirit, as my father poured out his love in words that would make Wiliam Wordsworth weep.

My father’s letters from Basic Training in 1954 reveal a husband desperate to be reunited with his wife. He wrote daily from his tar-paper hut at Ft. Bliss, Texas, a 24 x 24 ft. shelter that had previously been used (and later condemned for use) as a prisoner-of-war shelter during WWII. On one hot and dusty night after he’d returned for the day’s training, he writes:

Your voice has been with me every minute today and as I am still with you and you with me, I will try to speak to you this evening through these written words. Never in my life have I loved anyone as much as I loved you today while speaking to you. . . To be in a strange place without you is like being lost in a forest, calling and calling, but no one hearing your plea and no guiding hand to guide your steps home. As I look back on this past year, I never cease to marvel the way God brought together two people who were so perfectly suited to each other.

In letter after letter, my father writes of the strength and simplicity of their marital love, a love he understood –even as a young man–to be infinite and eternal. He confesses to committing my mother’s letters to memory and to living for each long-distance phone call from Gothenburg, Nebraska. And he reveals the vulnerability of a lover who is overcome with gratitude, as he confesses:

The tears of happiness are streaming down my face, for I realize how truly fortunate I am. Why did God single me out among men to bring so much happiness into my life? You have never seen me cry, but I am tonight, and the tears are coming without shame, for being alone, the happiness is overwhelming.

To think of my dad sitting in that tar-paper hut, overcome with tears as he poured out his love and longing over three handwritten pages (front and back), almost breaks me. In a good way. In the very best way. From the early days of their marriage, he could see through the years and knew how it would end: with a love for the ages, a love set apart and blessed by God.

In a few days, men and women will make their way to greeting card aisles all over the world. They’ll scan the rows of Valentine cards for just the right one; they’ll read the verse inside for just the right sentiment. And then, perhaps they’ll buy a dozen roses or a box of chocolates (or some cashews–always a good choice, I think!) for their Valentine. Over the years, I’ve read and received many Hallmark Valentines, but I don’t think that I’ll ever read words as poignant, as utterly lovely as these of my father:

My wife, if I never deeply convince you of another thing, know that I love you beyond my strength and with such a love that reaches far into a reserve that is not mine.

Throughout their marriage, my father wrote birthday, Christmas, and Valentine poems for my mother each year, tucking them into a clip on her vanity mirror. She kept all of these in a scrapbook decorated with pink and red hearts. As his writing style developed over the years, the ornate style of his early letters evolved into the leaner–yet no less ardent–style of a free verse poet. Consider these lines from a 1984 Christmas poem for my mom:

We may be broken hard upon
time’s stone, but what I’ve come to love
is nothing time can break. There are those who
deepen into love by way of all the risks love takes,
and you are one. This Christmas let me
name you what you are, a woman beautiful in time,
and tell you what I know: I could not come
to love for any better sake. 

The night my father died in our family home, I had to wake my mother who’d finally fallen asleep. She refused to leave the living room where his hospital bed had been moved, insisting that she sleep on the sofa. I will never forget my mom throwing her arms around my dad, quietly weeping, her heart broken and yet full of gratitude for his peaceful passing and for their love: one born from a great and holy reserve that neither time nor distance could break.

In those years after my father’s death, I know that my mom regularly reread my father’s letters. As she pulled each letter from its envelope and read her husband’s words, I know that she could hear his voice and that she found great solace in passages like these:

When in later life, we sit together and perhaps even with the children gone, for it may be in those years when they have married, we shall recall the most memorable times in our life together, and it will help us to realize once and for all, how very fortunate we were that God brought together two people so remarkably suited for each other to live under and within the laws of matrimony. Darling, we have so very much to be thankful for, and lest I forget, never let me forget that our children must come from the same kind of homes and live among the same love that we have experienced. If love was a tangible thing, I would capture as much of mine as would be possible and send it to you. But it is not tangible, and perhaps, therein lies its real beauty, for it cannot be seen, only experienced, cannot be purchased, only given. Tonight, I give my love to you, my darling, and hope that you will treasure it always, for it is honorably given and created in a simple but powerful heart, capable of enduring strife, loneliness, pity, hunger, and most of all being away from its earthly source.

I take great solace and find great hope in these words. I’ve always known that I had remarkable parents, but through these letters, I’ve come to see them as lovers. For them–and for me–these letters are a sanctuary. In this sanctuary, I’ve discovered a man and a woman who suffered poverty and separation, who raised six children and opened their home to visiting writers, friends, and students, who enjoyed the simple pleasures of crane-watching and Potato Olés at Taco Johns, who loved their family beyond measure, and who’d always known that their marriage would go the course, for it was uniquely blessed. The legacy of this marriage is, indeed, a Valentine for the ages.

The Valentines 
--fifty-three years ago

Each one cost a penny.
While I was picking them out,
your face hovered over the counter
like a vision—

better than a two-bit sack
of peanut clusters,

better than the Sales
in Lingerie.

Later, in my single-bulb
hotel room

I signed all 50
with a sigh.

        ---your varsity guard, No. 11, 1952 (Don Welch to Marica Welch on Valentine's Day, 2005)