Minnesota Prairie Roots

Writing and photography by Audrey Kletscher Helbling

If you take away my microwave… February 24, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 8:25 AM
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HAVE YOU EVER read Laura Numeroff’s children’s picture books, If You Give a Pig a Pancake or If You Give a Mouse a Cookie?

The storylines basically follow the premise that if you give someone something, they’ll want something else. Or one thing leads to another. For example, the mouse in Numeroff’s story asks for milk with his cookie then wants to look in a mirror and see if he has a milk mustache, etc. The pig needs syrup with his pancake, but gets so sticky he wants a bath, with bubbles, etc.

See how that works?

Now let’s apply that to my life, with this story:

My microwave oven, useful for cooking & experiments.

If your 18-year-old son hauls your microwave oven to his Advanced Chemistry class so he can measure the speed of light by melting marshmallows, you will need to find another way to prepare your morning oatmeal, or choose another food for breakfast.

If you opt for sugary cereal, then you’ll break your personal commitment to consume oatmeal each morning because your Uncle John, who eats oatmeal daily, told you doing so lowers cholesterol.

You’ll also derail your plan to a healthier and slimmer you.

By skipping the oatmeal, which you have found satisfyingly filling, you will find yourself reaching for a mid-morning snack. And, if you reach for a mid-morning snack…

See how that storyline goes? And all because of an Advanced Chemistry experiment.

I’m all about education, but if I don’t get my microwave back soon, I’ll…

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Traveling photography February 23, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 9:14 AM
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The clouds, the lighting, the red buildings slung against the sky drew my eyes and camera toward this farm along I-94 in western Minnesota.

I WASN’T ALWAYS a fan of winter photography. Honestly, who likes to navigate snow and ice and freeze your fingers off to shoot images? Not me.

But, since discovering on-the-road travel photography—meaning I actually fire off frames while riding in a vehicle traveling at highway/interstate speeds of 55 – 70 mph—I’ve come to embrace winter photography.

I started clicking my shutter when I saw this picturesque farm in the Avon/Albany area. This is frame two.

By the third frame, this beautiful fieldstone barn came into my sight line.

In winter the landscape lies exposed, giving a photographer ample opportunity to see and photograph subjects which, in other seasons, remain hidden. And I, for one, appreciate that openness and vulnerability.

My eyes fly across the landscape as I ride shotgun, camera in hand set to a fast shutter speed (the sports mode in automatic settings), poised to click the shutter button.

The weathered barn and the lighting around the silos drew me to photograph this scene.

Farm sites, specifically barns, cause me to lift my ever-ready camera from my lap, focus and shoot. Sometimes I get the shot, sometimes I don’t. It’s all in the timing and the ability to compose on the fly.

Consistently, the quality of these on-the-road photos surprises me, in a good way. Often I couldn’t have gotten better results had I stood still in front of the subject, focused and composed with care and shot many frames.

Of course, I’ve missed plenty of photo ops, too, because I’ve been daydreaming or talking or been too slow to react.

I honestly thought I'd missed this shot. But when I saw the results, well, I was pretty pleased.

A recent trip along Interstate 94 to and from Fargo gave me plenty of time to practice on-the-road photography as I focused on farm sites, the landscape and whatever else I found of interest.

An added bonus comes once I download the images into my computer and notice details I failed to see while photographing scenes.

The next time you hit the highway as a passenger on a long road trip, consider trying this type of photography.

Clean your windows, adjust your camera, buckle up and you’re set to roll.

Just one more farm along I-94 that I couldn't resist photographing.

TELL ME, HAVE you ever photographed using this method? What works/doesn’t work for you? And what do you like to photograph?

NOTE: Except to downsize the above images, I have not edited them.

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Broken hearts February 22, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 7:58 AM
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A dorm at NDSU, photographed during my campus visit last Friday.

FOUR YOUNG WOMEN die in a traffic accident along a snowy stretch of Interstate 94 in central Minnesota on Monday afternoon.

The news breaks your heart. How can it not?

Early Tuesday morning I published a post about a recent visit to the campus of North Dakota State University in Fargo, the destination for these women returning after a long holiday weekend.

I knew of the accident when I published the post. But I did not know then the names of the victims or their status as NDSU freshmen.

Jordan Playle, Danielle Renninger, Lauren Peterson and Megan Sample—three of them roommates—all from the Twin Cities metro area, are gone.

Students and staff on the campus I walked just days ago grieve.

Parents and siblings and other family members mourn.

Friends and high school classmates face the very real and tough reality of death.

And those of us parents who have sent our children off to college think about how many times we’ve hugged our kids goodbye, waved to them as they drove away and expected them to arrive, without incident, back at their dorms or apartments.

It is the kind of day when you want to circle your family close around you, wrap them in your arms and tell them how very much you love them.

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

What I learned on a college visit may surprise you February 21, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 8:02 AM
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A sign supporting Bison athletics in a NDSU dorm.

WHAT DO BEAGLES and bison have in common?

If you were to travel to Fargo, you would learn that beagles and bison are integral to North Dakota State University. I picked up that information during a campus visit Friday with my husband and college-bound son.

“Do you like dogs?” our campus tour guide asked.

“No,” my 18-year-old answered.

But the other student in our tour group did, so he was advised that beagles can be checked out from the veterinarian program and taken for walks.

Now you might think that I am about to tell you bison also live on campus. No. (At least I didn’t see any.) But the bison is the university’s mascot and you’ll see that noted everywhere.

Here’s another interesting tidbit I learned: NDSU students drink a lot of Mountain Dew. I wish I recalled our student tour guide’s exact quote about high consumption of this soda. But I remember thinking, “This is not something I would tell parents of prospective students.”

As long as we’re talking consumption here, I was pleased to hear that comfort foods like tator tot hotdish are offered in the dining halls, of which there are three.

Over in a computer lab, engineering students can dish up servings of humor via a collection of “The Far Side” comics found on a corner bookshelf. My husband and son both enjoy Gary Larson’s humor. Me? Not so much. But I appreciate that among all the academia, laughter is encouraged.

It’s little details like this which reveal so much about a college.

A tour group, not ours, checks out the basketball court in the NDSU Wellness Center. It was the view through the bank of windows which most impressed me. This is typical Fargo, land stretching flat and far.

It’s also reassuring, though, to hear, as we did from an engineering professor, about the more serious aspects of college life. This teacher shared that potential employers value the strong work ethic prevalent among NDSU graduates.

That same educator looked my son directly in the eye and advised him to choose a career path that follows his passion and will make him happy in his life’s work. I couldn’t think of any better career advice than to choose happiness over money.

I appreciated his honesty and attitude and friendliness and enthusiasm, and even the computer information he exchanged with my teen. This visit really was all about my son and the choices he’ll make.

Based on our interaction with this professor, I could see the connection between student and teacher which, when I asked, he defined as the strength of the NDSU engineering program. It’s fostered partially by small class sizes.

My specific inquiry about the program’s strength caught the professor a bit off guard. But that’s OK. I like to ask the unexpected.

I didn’t care about the cost of parking or space for a big screen television in a dorm room or whether an elevator is available on move-in day. Yes, inquiries were made of our student guide on those topics. But not by anyone in my family.

As for the beagles and the bison, the tator tot hotdish and “The Far Side” comics (and, yes, even the Mountain Dew), those personalized the university.

But what matters most are affordability, quality of education, connections and that my soon-to-be high school graduate finds a college that is a good fit for him and will make him happy.

HOW ABOUT YOU? If you’re the parent of a college-bound child or have had a child go through college, what do you/did you look for in a post-secondary institution? What questions would you ask?

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

On the road to Fargo, where sky meets land February 20, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 8:07 AM
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Only 192 miles to Fargo, North Dakota. We've already driven 93.

SKY. That single word defines a road trip from Faribault to Fargo.

Don’t talk miles and time to me. Talk sky.

Once past the St. Cloud exit along Interstate 94, you start noticing the sky, how, the farther west you travel, the larger it becomes until the sheer immensity of that above overwhelms that below.

Sky meets land somewhere westbound along Interstate 94 toward Fargo.

For those who live in the confines of the city, where buildings and masses of streets and highways pull the sky downward and ground it, the vastness of the skies can unsettle the spirit and create a sense of vulnerability. You can’t help but feel exposed under brooding clouds and a sky that stretches into a distance without end.

Interstate 94 sometimes seems to run right into the sky as you drive west.

Yet, for me, a prairie native, there’s a certain sense of calm that comes from traveling into the sky. Because that is what you do when driving west from Minnesota toward the Dakotas. You drive into the sky.

After an initial awareness that you really are incredibly small compared to that above, you begin to notice the details. Or at least I begin to appreciate the details—like the hard edge where sky meets land, the ever-changing skyscape as clouds shift and the day wanes, the nuances in colors and texture that define firmament and field.

Power lines set against the backdrop of the sky provide a visual vertical respite for the eyes.

It is as if you’ve brushed yourself right into a landscape painting.

And I can’t get enough of it, of the strong horizontal lines that sweep across my vision, reconnecting me to my prairie past.

The landscape: flat and into forever near Fargo/Moorhead.

The ever-changing clouds blend with the rural landscape.

As the sun sets, the sky broods.

The sharp contrast of black and white against blue pleases my eyes.

Fence lines and farms slice through the land.

A church spire in the distance draws my eye in this place where my soul reconnects to the prairie.

ALL OF THESE IMAGES were taken with my DSLR camera, set at a fast shutter speed, while traveling along Interstate 94. Check back for more posts from this trip to Fargo.

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Three bald eagles on a Sunday February 19, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 4:12 PM
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AS OBSERVANT AS I AM, and I’m quite detail-oriented, I don’t profess to have an eagle eye. That would be my husband. Randy possesses an uncanny ability to notice birds of prey in the wild.

A few weeks ago he pointed out an owl perched on a fence post as we traveled along a state highway around dusk. He’s always spotting hawks circling overhead, riding the wind.

See the two eagles in the distant trees here on the west side of State Highway 13 near Waseca?

But this time, this past Sunday afternoon, he saw two bald eagles in a stand of trees several miles north of Waseca along Minnesota State Highway 13. Now typically nothing much raises Randy’s demeanor to a level of excitement. However, he was excited enough to swing our van into a U-turn, backtrack to the grove of trees and pause so he could gawk.

Although we’d seen eagles in the wild before, we’d never seen them this close—about 60 feet away horizontally and another 30 feet away vertically.

Parked along the wide shoulder of the highway, I shot this image of the eagles.

Stopping within feet of a deer carcass, the road kill that we figure drew the eagles to this grove of trees, Randy watched the birds while I photographed, wishing all the time for a telephoto lens.

After our brief eagle-watching, we continued on to Morristown, missed our turn and spotted another bald eagle. This time I requested we backtrack because I was, by then, already formulating this blog post in my mind.

We had just passed Veterans Memorial Park, a new memorial to veterans in this Rice County town of 1,000 residents. It features a bald eagle as the focal point.

This time, without highway traffic passing dangerously close, I exited the van and captured close up our nation’s majestic symbol of freedom.

The bald eagle, flanked by flags, at the vets park in Morristown.

A broad view of the new memorial, which includes pavers honoring veterans.

Shooting into the sun, I took this shot of the memorial eagle.

HAVE YOU EVER seen a bald eagle in the wild? Tell me about your experience.

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

The unavoidable numbers games February 17, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 9:22 PM
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A variety of games are available to play during the monthly Family Game Night at Trinity Lutheran Church, Faribault. On this Saturday in February, three separate tables of gamers play Sequence, Buzz Word and Settlers of Catan.

I SPOT THE PLAYING cards and poker chips and instantly veer from the table. They laugh, knowing anything involving numbers drives me away.

“It’s not math,” they try to explain. “It’s like Connect Four.” I will hear none of it. I threaten to overturn their table because this looks like gambling to me and we are in church.

But they are playing Sequence, nothing like the money mongering in the temple.

This is Family Game Night, a monthly gathering in the Trinity Lutheran Church fellowship hall of friends who play board games and talk and laugh and eat.

Those who attend game night bring snacks to share.

This February night, just days before Valentine’s Day, we are treated to heart-shaped sugar cookies Tammy and her daughter Hannah baked, frosted and sprinkled with sugar. I tell them how I, too, once made cut-out heart cookies every Valentine’s Day. But now my girls are all grown up and gone and I don’t’ bake much any more because the guys in the house don’t crave sweets and I do and I don’t need them, the sweets that is.

Billie Jo's decadent brownies.

Tonight, though, I indulge in the sugary treats—the heart-shaped raspberry cake and the brownies with the decadent caramel, M & M and marshmallow toppings. And then, to balance the unhealthy overload, I sample Mandy’s “healthy brownies,” if brownies can be healthy, and grab a baby carrot.

Between bites, I play Buzz Word, shouting out words in response to a clue along with my two senior team members, senior meaning those over age 50. The juniors—41 and under—although numbering only two, beat us each round.

My favorite games involve words, not numbers. No surprise there.

Winning matters not as much as the company of friends, in the savoring of moments like Billie Jo’s 4-year-old swooping into the room with a valentine he’s made for her. Later his sister arrives with a second delivery. I wonder out loud to my friend if the kids, tucked into the nursery with a babysitter, are making valentines for all of us. They aren’t.

I remember, earlier in the day, going through drawers in a desk at home and finding red valentine hearts colored by my own daughters at the same age.

Still later, when we sing happy birthday to Jesse, I remember what it was like to turn 40 and wonder why turning that age bothered me so much now that I am creeping toward 60.

On this Saturday Family Game Night, even though I’ve tried as I always do, I can’t avoid numbers.

The group of regulars who prefer strategy games played Settlers of Catan on Saturday night. I avoid strategy games, that also require a great deal of thinking and concentration, just like I avoid number/mathematical games.

DO YOU PLAY board games? What are your favorites (or not so favorites) and why?

(P.S. Dear readers, please pretend this post was published before Valentine’s Day.)

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Ice art in rural Minnesota February 16, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 8:52 AM
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CAN YOU IMAGINE how impressed I would be if ever I viewed the Saint Paul Winter Carnival snow and ice sculptures?

Up until Sunday, the only ice sculptures familiar to me clung to milkhouse and house rooflines or clumped like frozen waterfalls along bluffs in the Mississippi RiverValley.

In the winters of my youth, when winter truly was winter with mountains of snow from which to build forts and an abundance of icicles from which to grab swords, I welcomed the season.

The clash of icicle against icicle in a swordfight with my brothers and sisters entertained me between rounds of shoving manure into gutters and feeding cows and bedding straw and carrying pails of steaming milk replacer to calves huddled in the calf barn.

That and memories of boot-skating across patches of frozen water in the farmyard and along the edges of the cornfield encompassed my general experiences with ice.

Until Sunday.

For the first time, I viewed ice as anything but Nature’s art or a source of youthful entertainment or a peril to be avoided.

Horse and sleigh ice sculpture in Waseca, a rural southern Minnesota community.

Just south of the Waseca County Courthouse, partially in the shadow of a downtown building and along busy State Street/Minnesota Highway 13, artists Adam Scholljegerdes and Joe Christenson, with assistance from their families, crafted a horse and sleigh from ice blocks in celebration of Waseca’s 62nd annual Sleigh and Cutter Festival.

She’s a beauty.

For the first time ever in 62 years, ice sculpting was added to Sleigh and Cutter festivities. The event typically involves ice harvesting from Clear Lake, something which did not happen this year due to warm weather and open water. The ice sculpture is just south of the Waseca County Courthouse, a snippet seen here to the right.

Of course, I have nothing with which to compare this work of art. But suffice to say that the pair’s rendition of a horse pulling a sleigh impressed me, my husband and plenty of others who stopped to photograph the ice sculpture, even sit on the sleigh and pet the horse.

Even an ice horse needs petting.

This ice sculpture is a new addition to the annual winter festival which spans several weeks and weekends in February. This year’s fest, which included events like snowmobile races, card tournaments, ice fishing and a parade, runs through February 19. One final event, a Children’s Dream Catcher fundraiser for terminally-ill children in the Waseca area, is set for March 24.

For now, the ice sculpture serves as a visual focal point for the Sleigh and Cutter Festival.

Make haste, I say, if you want to view this temporary work of art in rural southern Minnesota.

This close-up image shows the blocks of ice that comprise the horse. Artists labored nearly 3 1/2 days transforming 50 blocks of ice into this work of art. Sculptor Adam Scholljegerdes worked on a team that recently won first place in the amateur division ice sculpting competition at the Saint Paul Winter Carnival. He is an artist at Brushwork Signs in Faribault, where I live. Joe Christenson has competed at the Saint Paul Winter Carnival since 1986.

An ice-sculpting sponsor points to the Waseca community's rural roots.

A back view of the sculpture, looking toward historic buildings in Waseca's downtown business district.

CLICK HERE for more information about Waseca’s Sleigh and Cutter Festival.

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

“Ted from Owatonna” honored for his firefighting efforts February 14, 2012

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 11:05 PM
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“I HAVE A NEW-FOUND appreciation for what you guys do,” Ted Leon of Owatonna told members of the Faribault Professional Fire Fighters Local 665 Tuesday evening.

It’s the type of comment I’ve come to expect from Ted, who five months earlier stopped on a Saturday afternoon to extinguish a deck fire at my neighbor’s house. He’s not one to call attention to himself or his actions.

Ted Leon, originally known only as "Ted from Owatonna" extinguishes a fire on and under my neighbor's deck with water from a garden hose around 4 p.m. on Saturday, September 10, 2011.

But on Valentine’s Day evening, the spotlight centered on Ted as he received a Certificate of Recognition from the City of Faribault in a formal presentation before a City Council meeting and then afterward an Emergency Action Award from the firefighters during a casual gathering at the fire hall.

Faribault Mayor John Jasinski reads the city's Certificate of Recognition as Ted Leon, Director of Fire and Emergency Management Joe Berg and Jon Bolster of the fire department look on.

Kristin Klocek, left, and her daughter Kayleigh gather with Ted and Kathryn Leon and sons Jack and Thomas at the informal presentation in the fire hall by union president Ed Hoisington, right.

Ted Leon receives his award from the local firefighters union. This type of award is also given occasionally to those who assist at motor vehicle crashes. An award for helping at a fire was last given a year ago to Xcel Energy, Todd Rost of the fire department said.

It was there in the fire station, surrounded by his family, my neighbors and members of the fire department, that Ted expressed his gratitude to firefighters, recognizing the difficulty of their work. He shared, for the first time, how his heart was racing at the scene of the September 10, 2011, deck fire and for hours afterward.

That admission from Ted surprised me given his calm demeanor while fighting the flames. He spotted the blaze while driving on Willow Street, pulled over, instructed his wife, Kathryn, to call 911 and stay in the van with their three sons, and then ran toward the fire.

Kathryn told me Tuesday that the emergency call was actually made by a young man who also stopped. She locked eyes with him and he indicated he had contacted emergency personnel. The fire department arrived within minutes.

Alerted to the blaze by my teenage son, I grabbed my camera and raced barefoot across the street, reaching Kevin and Kristin Klocek’s home just as Ted was pulling a garden hose toward the burning deck.

He remembers focusing on putting out the fire. I remember screaming for my neighbors to get out of their house. Ted and I didn’t communicate. But if we had, I would have learned that he had already leapt through heat and flames to bang on the front door, alerting Kristin and her young daughter, Kayleigh, of the fire.

The City of Faribault, in the Certificate of Recognition, thanked this citizen firefighter, in part, with these words: “Your quick actions ensured the occupants of the home got out safely and the damage to the home remained minimal.”

Exactly.

I, too, thanked Ted Leon—again—Tuesday evening.

When I first thanked him, at the scene of the fire, I knew him only as “Ted from Owatonna.” He didn’t give me his last name that day, when I questioned his identity as he was about to drive away. But he was found anyway, round-about via a blog post I published on the fire. Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio picked up the story in his online NewsCut column. Then The Owatonna People’s Press and The Faribault Daily News published front page stories and photos I had taken, which led to the discovery of Ted Leon.

Ted told me Tuesday he’s not one to draw attention to himself, explaining why he didn’t give me his last name on that day we first met, the day of the fire. He was in a hurry, too, on that September afternoon to get to services at Divine Mercy Catholic Church about a mile away.

He wasn’t in any particular hurry Tuesday evening, posing for photos, but also taking time to thank the firefighters. That’s typical Ted, deflecting the spotlight away from himself..

When an alarm sounded at the fire hall as we were visiting on Tuesday, I advised Ted, “You better get going.” He didn’t miss a beat.

“I’m retired,” he quipped.

Kathryn, who earlier said everything happened so quickly at the September fire that she didn’t have time to worry about Ted, simply rolled her eyes and laughed.

The certificate Ted received from the City of Faribault.

TO READ MY September 10, 2011, blog post about the fire, click here.

To read yet another post about the day Ted was found, click here.

© Copyright 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Sweet Valentine’s Day memories from the Minnesota prairie

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 8:06 AM
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An American Greetings valentine from my husband, 1987.

DINNER OUT. Chocolate and roses.

What are your expectations of Valentine’s Day?

After nearly 30 years of marriage, I typically hold no visions of a day celebrated in a big, splashy way. Usually I’ll receive a card, perhaps a bag of Hershey’s kisses and an extra kiss or two from the man I love. He usually reserves flowers for the times when I least expect flowers—when my spirit needs uplifting. I love that about my husband, how he occasionally surprises me with a simple bouquet. This year he surprised me with flowers two days before Valentine’s Day.

February 14, for me, means mostly memories, sweet, sweet memories of childhood years exchanging valentines. The anticipation and preparation for the day nearly equaled the exuberance of the annual Valentine’s Day party at Vesta Elementary School during the 1960s.

At home on our prairie farm, my siblings and I thumbed through over-sized books of valentines at the kitchen table, choosing, then punching hearts from pages, glitter sparkling across our fingers, clinging to the oilcloth or swirling toward the dingy linoleum like a sprinkling of fairy dust.

It was, if anything, magical.

There were no thin, wispy, cartoon or celebrity valentines pulled from boxes. Those would come years later in the modernization of valentines, a mass production move that diminished the romance, the charm, the personal connection that comes only from the precise punching of hearts from paper.

A Brittney Spears valentine my son received 11 years ago from his classmate Vanessa.

We hand-picked conversation candy hearts for classmates, pondering the message we wanted, or did not want, to send. Sometimes we simply taped a single stick of Juicy Fruit or Black Jack gum to the back of a valentine. Canary yellow and bright blue amid all that red and pink.

When all the names were scrawled across valentines, all the names checked from a list, all sugary treats parceled out, all the glitter swept from the kitchen floor, we awaited the morning of the party.

Meanwhile in the classroom, we’d create valentine boxes, creasing white paper around shoeboxes before dipping our fingers into tall jars of thick white paste to adhere the paper and then decorate it with red and pink construction paper hearts.

I remember the challenge of drawing the perfect hearts, of first folding a piece of white scrap paper and then penciling the half-shape of a heart before cutting, then tracing the pattern onto construction paper, cutting again and, finally, pasting.

If shoeboxes were in short supply, which they often were in our house (we didn’t get new shoes all that often), we crafted white paper into valentine bags to tape to our desks.

A valentine my son received from his grandparents probably a decade ago.

With Valentine’s Day excitement came a certain sense of apprehension, first of safely transporting the greeting cards on the bus to school and then opening the valentines distributed by classmates.

Would we get an unwanted lovey, dovey message? Had we chosen the right messages for the right classmates?

Today I have no remembrance of boys who broke my heart on Valentine’s Day. Nor do I remember details of a party that likely involved nothing more than distributing and opening valentines.

Rather, I remember hearts and glitter and clustering around the kitchen table. I remember peeling thick white paste from my fingers and the chalky texture and taste of candy hearts and the delight of unwrapping a stick of gum, then sliding and folding it into my mouth in a burst of juicy flavor.

Those are my memories on this day of chocolate and flowers and love.

WHAT ARE YOURS?

© Copyright text 2012 Audrey Kletscher Helbling