let me call you sweetheart

a blizzard of hearts and flowers

Valentine’s Day, five-year-old me: stubby legs dangling from a wooden stool, those legs decades away from crossing the Boston Marathon finish line, my mother’s art studio strewn with lace and pink paper hearts, “I LOVE YOU” scribbled in white Crayola and—

fifty years later, when I am the mom, I order a singing Valentine and the local barbershop quartet visits us during a whiteout, a blizzard of roses and chocolate and song and she cries and I carry her heart, share her heartbeat, our love greater than life itself and when I fall awake, her lavender baby lotion, a distant melody—