LOVE

Love. What is there to say? That love is all you need? If only…And what are we saying when we say “I love you”..?

Can love be conveyed through words? Many have tried. Love letters abounded for centuries, written in complex sentences, feelings of love explored in the dark of night; in the trenches, from the prison cell, in a young maiden’s room; candles guttering with desire, casting shadows on the page, ink drying in the form of love. Now we have the emoticon.

A friend sent me a photo this morning. The photo, taken by David Goldblatt in 1964, during the apartheid years in South Africa, shows a young boy standing behind his nursemaid who is seated on concrete border. His hands rest gently on her cowed shoulders. Her left hand reaches being her to clasp his left foot; a gesture of forbidden love that grounds him. Far away the Beatles sing, “Love Me Do.”

David Goldblatt   A Farmers Son with his Nursemaid. 1964

For some reason I had no sense of this day’s approach. Normally a hopeless romantic who can spend hours making some love token for Joel I never gave it a thought this year. Maybe when you reach our age and still experience being in love then that is all you need. There is no need to make something that represents love…there is no stand-in for love. Sadly, there are many alternatives: hatred being the absolute enemy of love drags in its wake its lesser disciples; judgment, envy, greed, prejudice and all the variables that fear engenders.

The month of February seems to have crept in the back door while I wasn’t looking. One minute it was Christmas, the next it was January and we were living and loving it up in London and time seemed to standstill while it filled itself up with goodness and then suddenly it was 5th February and time to return to Tuscany. And we came home full of all the love we and been given, our own rekindled, so it never occurred to me that this day was upon us until yesterday, when Joel could no longer contain his excitement about the gift he was to give me this morning.

He found it a month ago in the back room of an antique shop in Florence. Wrapped in dusty old newspaper it had been left on the shelf, so to speak, for who knows how long. This morning, wrapped in gold paper and tied with string, it sat on the kitchen table. I picked it up and felt the weight of it, the kind of weight that has metaphoric import. Tenderly I unwrapped it and found it to be the 2 halves of a brass mold in the shape of a heart. It made me gasp. The one half, contained the plump mound of heart, the other its mirror opposite, concave and empty; the two halves necessary to each other. The two halves making one heavy heart…and whose heart is not heavy these days?

I look at these 2 hearts, the one so full and bursting, the other empty, waiting to receive and I wonder how many times some wafer of metal was placed between them. I see the hearts pressed together, and in their yearning to touch they impress themselves onto a blank material, the material forced to yield until it takes on the shape of love; the new heart perhaps then filled with chocolate, again and again, until there are enough to fill a box tied with red ribbon and given to a young woman who sucks on the sweetness, longing to be filled with its aphrodesia, unaware of how much work it takes to make love.

And that young boy, is he still alive? And if so, does he still feel the imprint of his nursemaid's hand; her love given against all odds.