Fifty-Two Valentines

I have given my wife fifty-two Valentine's cards. The first one I bought at a drugstore with money from my paper route. It had a cartoon bear on it and I spelled her name wrong.

She kept it. She kept all of them, in a shoebox on the top shelf of the closet. Last week our granddaughter found the box and we spent an entire afternoon reading them out loud. Some were funny, some were sappy, and a couple from the hard years were short, just "Still here. Still yours."

That was the truth, every year. We've moved six times, raised three kids, buried our parents, lost jobs and found better ones. Through all of it there was a card on February fourteenth.

People ask me the secret. I don't think there is one. You just keep choosing each other, one ordinary day at a time. And once a year you write it down, even if you spell it wrong.