The Hearts have It!

I'm not really a fanatic about Valentine's Day, but I am noting that it is less than two weeks away.

I don't want a dozen roses (I'd accept them though), I really don't want a box of chocolates, and going out for a romantic, intimate dinner on the 14th--not possible when everyone else is doing the same, besides the prices are all jacked-up.

I think I have already received my gift. A week ago when we were at the book store in Pacific Grove, I asked Mr. Fun to buy me the book Valentine's: poems by Ted Kooser. The store had an attractive display of Valentine books. It was not only attractive, it was successful--caused me to purchase one. I'm really enjoying it. Kooser is a professor at the University of Nebraska. He's also the former U.S. poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

In 1986 he wrote a Valentine poem and mailed it to fifty women and continued doing it every year since. By 2007 his mailing list had grown to twenty-six hundred women who had signed-up for his annual mailing. So he made that poem the last, and then compiled them into this book.

The poems are not sickening sweet or syrupy. They are written with vivid imagery and you'll read them again and again. I read some of them to Mr. Fun this morning, and then this afternoon, after lunch, he read four or five more of them to me. He likes them too.

Well, that's my thought for the first of February. I hope everyone has had a fabulous Sunday. I understand the Pittsburgh Steelers have. Good night from the western edge of the U.S.

Rosie, aka Carol