“What’s in a love letter, anyway?” he asked. 

I was in a mood.  A little pouty and weepy, my inner 4-year-old whining, “I just don’t feel special!”  God, why does this keep happening every month?  It’s so ridiculous.   Okay, rather than stuff it and wait for it to go away, I will wrap that little girl in my own arms and listen to her.  She wants to feel loved.  She doubts her self-worth every once in  awhile and wants someone to show a preference for her and please her.  “Little One, you are precious,” I tell her.  I am taking responsibility for caring for this vulnerable one.  Me.  Passing that burden on to anyone else is manipulative and fosters a kind of co-dependency.  I don’t want that any more.  Oh, but I used to rely on it pretty routinely.  I had a husband who, for 24 years, lavished me with gifts and compliments and love letters.   I have been with Steve now for 4 years.  He has never even bought me a greeting card.  I do not want him to be other than he is, and I believe he loves me profoundly.  So, what is the love letter game about?  “What’s in a love letter, anyway?” Steve asked.

Six parts flattery to one part youth…or is that a martini?  So I began to make a list of the elements of a love letter,  Cat Stevens’ song “Two Fine People” running through my brain.  In one column, I put the parts that I know Steve would never embrace.  In the other column, I put the bits that I think he does communicate, albeit in person and not in writing.  The list began to resemble another amusing song: “Title of the Song” (by DaVinci’s Notebook), which you really must click on and listen to if you never have before.      …Now, wasn’t that fun?

So I showed Steve the little orange Post-It note that carried this weighty list.  On the left, I’d written “flattery; promises: to rescue, for future, to provide; declaration of desire”.  On the right I’d written “honesty, appreciation, gratitude, description of how I love”.  I told him that his description of how he loves is unique and authentic to him and doesn’t resemble Cat Stevens’ (“…though Time may fade and mountains turn to sand…’til the very same come back to the land”).  He walked to one of his bookshelves and took down his “Bible”, a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  “How’s this for a love letter?”  he asked and read from “Song of Myself”:

The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides;
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.

The little girl opens her wet eyes and looks wide.  Wondering, feeling alive, an equal to the sun and the trees and the birds in the sky and every playmate in the Universe.  Is this not Love, this embrace?  I reckon that it is.