Love, Wade
A heartfelt essay about how transformative Valentine's Day can be, if we are just brave enough to embrace its never-changing intent.
On this Valentine’s Day, I wanted to share a special essay I wrote about love. It’s meant to show how much we all need and deserve love — unconditional love — and that the pain in our lives can only be healed with time, love of self and forgiveness.
Moreover, essay writing is still essential for authors today: It can bring your book to life in a new way for a new audience, it can garner publicity, and it can say everything in just a few words. ENJOY!
It was an art project tradition in my 1970s Ozarks grade school for children to make their own Valentine's Day mailboxes and then walk around the classroom personally delivering cards to each classmate like a kiddie postman.
I took this business seriously, as it was one of the few truly creative outlets I had in the Ozarks. That's why my Valentine's creations were always a childish blend of Charles Eames and Edith Head (not an envied mix, mind you, in my rural classroom).
My great undoing came when I created a Barbie-themed mailbox, using shocking pink gauze and Barbie's body parts as my foundational décor. I had always wanted a Barbie but never received one, so a girl in school gave me one. I dressed Barbie's torso a la Cupid with little pink wings and a little pink quiver filled with little pink bows.
But the piece de resistance was the mailbox flag I crafted from Barbie's missing legs, positioning them sideways, so that one long, glam gam could be lifted into vertical position to show when I had received a card, or lowered to show when my box had been emptied.
My masterpiece was greeted with great fanfare by the class bully, a kid who simply and scarily used an empty cigarette carton to gather his Valentine's booty.
He opened my mailbox to announce, "What have we here?"
