Of Love

It's Valentine's Day today, and the fourth anniversary of me proposing to Jeanine. On today's agenda, we're going to clean the chicken coop together and later on, watch the mid-season premiere of The Walking Dead. Maybe somewhere in between we'll do something more in keeping with the holiday.

Other than what I've mentioned above, I don't have any Valentine's Day memories that I consider interesting or unusual enough to share here. For the most part, it's a holiday engineered to move vast quantities of stuffed bears, red flowers, and boxes of chocolate from merchants to people who want to reassure significant others that yes, they are loved.

My parents stayed married until the end, but didn't live together for a large chunk of that time. I was between high school and college when my dad announced that he'd be moving out. I don't remember being too surprised, so I must have subconsciously known that my parents' relationship was headed in that direction. I can remember my dad being stressed out a lot of the time, and he often stayed at work late. My mom called him a "workaholic". I'm not sure exactly what the breaking point was, although I imagine it was a lot of little things rather than one big one. My teenage self was self-absorbed enough to simply take it in stride, and my brother seemed likewise unaffected. We just carried on with our lives while our dad got an apartment nearby.

Up until the end, even after our dad moved up to Citrus Heights near Sacramento, we continued to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas together, with my dad making the long trip down to join us. My parents also kept in touch during the year, checking in with each other. I'm not sure how often they talked, but I know they did. I seem to remember my dad having a brief fling with a woman that he worked with, not that he ever brought it up (I don't think this started before he moved out though - that would be troubling). It was more of a case of reading between the lines. Both of my parents were relatively private individuals, and despite all of my writing here, so am I. Most of the time, I feel like I'm typing into the void here. I know a few people who either regularly or irregularly read this blog, but I don't go out of my way to send people in this direction. This writing continues to be more for me than anybody else, although lately I feel like I'm chronicling my life here more for the benefit of those who come after. Someday, after I'm gone, Willow might be interested in digging through these posts. History, even family history, isn't for the young though. Right now, she is firmly rooted in the present. Someday that will probably change.