Valentine

There's a stained glass window in the house where I grew up, where my father grew up, where his father grew up. And yes, even where his father grew up.

In that window, worked into the ruby glass, is a name: Valentine.

Not an Italian saint. My great-great grandfather.

I don't know why Valentine chose to settle in a small midwestern town. I don’t know where he got the money to build that large house on a large farm. I haven't done the genealogical deep dive to uncover his history prior to that, though I like to imagine he was on the run from something more interesting than the truth probably allows. Given that his descendants fall firmly into the pedantic rule-follower category (one became the county sheriff), it's unlikely he was fleeing the law. But one can dream.

I wonder what he was like. Formidable, certainly. You don't build something meant to last generations without either vision or stubbornness, and in my family, we tend toward the latter. Did he have a sense of humor about that window? Did his wife roll her eyes every time the sun hit it? ("Yes, dear, we all see your name. Very subtle.")

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, named for one or two (or three) third-century Roman saints about whom we know almost nothing certain. The holiday itself is a confection of medieval love poetry, Victorian sentimentality, and modern commercialism. We celebrate it with chocolate, roses, and cards printed by the millions.

But my Valentine left something less mysterious or fleeting: a house. Solid walls that held his family. Each following generation of that family shaped by the rooms he designed, colored by the light coming through that window with his name on it.

Writers talk a lot about leaving our mark, about creating something that outlasts us. We pour ourselves into pages, hoping our words will reach someone we'll never meet, in a time we'll never see.

Valentine did it with glass and mortar and wood. With a house that said: I was here. I built this. Remember me.

And we do. Four generations later, we still do.

Maybe that's the real valentine not the flowers that wilt or the chocolates that disappear, but the things we build that shelter the people who come after us. The homes we make, the stories we tell, the names we preserve in whatever medium we have available.

Stained glass or sentences on a page.