A Valentine memory in snow & silence

Author’s Note: As I stepped out my door onto the porch one recent night, I saw the sparkling of the diamond-like brilliance of the almost-full moon upon the virgin surface of the snow. It brought to my mind the first story I wrote in my “Book of Days” journal on January 1, 2011. It may have been written at New Year’s, but it will always be a Special Valentine for me.

By Bonnie Seeley

A New Year came in last night. It came in a strange and unusual fashion, though, because it entered by way of silence.

I had the TV on for company, more than anything else. My mind overflowed with the memories of all the New Year’s Eves that my late husband Floyd and I had spent together. We had met at Elmira College, in the Fall of 1969, and we’d married just 13 days after our graduation. This was my first New Year’s Eve without him, and I really didn’t know what to do.

There had been good years and not-so-good ones. I especially remembered our early years … 34 years ago, for instance. I was locked inside a psychiatric facility, and Floyd was allowed to visit me just until the New Year -- 1977 -- was rung in.

I was being treated for a severe post-partum psychosis. Just 25 days earlier, we had welcomed our early Christmas present, in the form of a precious baby boy, Aaron Christopher. Aaron was being cared for by doting grandparents, aunts and uncles, so his Daddy could come to visit Mommy for the evening.

Floyd had arrived in the early evening, but for the life of me, I cannot remember what we had done for those five or six hours that we had spent together. I just recall that the staff was very adamant about dismissing all visitors by 12:05 a.m.

Just after midnight, as he buttoned up his heavy, split cowhide coat and donned a warm hat and gloves, Floyd told me to go up to my second-floor room and look out the single narrow window. I desperately clung to him, not wanting to be left “abandoned” there.

I pressed my nose against the frost-covered window of the exit door until he had passed out of my line of sight. I then hastened up the stairs to my cubicle of a room and rushed across my “cell” to the one steamed-up window. (The room was much like I pictured a prison cell … small, with minimal stark furnishings.)

What could be the surprise that he would have for me out there? I couldn’t even begin to imagine. The full winter moon upon the surface of the new-fallen snow gave an illusion of millions and millions of sparkling diamonds. I could tell that the air was crystal clear and ferociously frigid.

And there was my darling husband, father of our firstborn child, stepping laboriously through several inches of fresh snow, using his footsteps to spell out a message to me on the previously-unblemished landscape.

In letters several feet high, he had written a heartfelt message. There, upon the virgin snow, he was professing a message for me, God, and all the world to see:

“I LOVE YOU!” is what it said.

My eyes brimmed with tears, as I waved and blew him an answering kiss. No Valentine’s card from Hallmark could ever have expressed it as eloquently as he had … in snow and silence.