Remember the colorful little valentines we slipped into decorated lunch bags on February 14th? My dear Aunt celebrated nearly forty Valentine’s Day mail drops with her second and third grade students. . . and I think she kept a large number of those little paper tokens.
I’ve given myself “permission” to save one box of ephemera from Auntie’s collections, but the box keeps getting larger. How can anyone resist little treasures like these 1950’s valentine’s sent to Mrs. Turner?
The real surprise came as I skimmed through the various cards and I found more than one Valentine with my own name carefully written on the back. It’s often that our own mail comes back to us, so I am sending this out again with Best Wishes for a Happy Valentine’s Day!
Having your communications come back to you is indeed a gift. When my dad died and we were going through his home office, we found he'd saved every letter we'd ever sent him, every letter his grandchildren had ever sent him, and every email any of us had written him. He'd even printed out all the emails, punched holes, and saved them in 3-ring notebooks, organized by family. I can't tell you what a gift it was to be able to see my children's "written relationships" with their grandpa documented in that way. We talk now about our paperless offices, but if Dad's emails had still been buried in his computer email files, we would never have found that handpicked collection, and it would have gotten buried in all his other email communications.