Water supply issues still vexing Valatie

By NANCY JANE KERN

IT IS VALENTINE’S DAY THIS WEEK, and the signs are here with daylight hours lengthening and bird songs beginning to change as they “tune up” for the spring mating season. The rich yellow sunlight improves our days, and our indoor plants, like geraniums, begin to respond with new leaves and beautiful red blossoms.

We also enjoy this season of hope and have the thousands of years old traditions of Rome, the god Eros (later to become Cupid), the pagan fertility rituals, and stories of Father Valentine, who helped young couples to marry. They shaped our ideas of courtship, and the 1800s really got the Valentine’s Day card and candy thing going, and it is still here and flourishing in the 21st Century.

This holiday has become one of the most celebrated days of the year. We spent $17 billion this year on millions of red roses, heart-shaped boxes of candy, diamonds, and dinners. We girls expect it, and you guys better not forget. From the feminine perspective, it should count as our way of stimulating the economy and having lots of fun at the same time.

An old family album turned up some memories of stories of the 1940s. There is a photo taken by my father of my mother, then Marion Wambach, in the family cutter with his favorite horse, Dan, in the harness. Mother would look at this photo and smile and talk about this day in February.

My parents grew up on neighboring farms about a mile from each other. They went to different one-room schoolhouses but saw each other enough that they did not like each other. Father, Donald Kern, stayed home on the farm and supported his parents. Mother went off to become a registered nurse, worked in New York City for a while, and started college. Finances were difficult so she left the City and went to work in Connecticut as an RN at the Sharon Hospital. Mother and her best friend, Jane came home to a Methodist Church supper in Harlemville one weekend and afterward washed dishes with my father. My father soon started dating my mother. Jane thought he was quite handsome, a real “catch,” with his blond curly hair and muscular build, and encouraged mother to keep seeing him. Mother decided he had improved since they were kids, and a year later he asked her to go for a sleigh ride in the horse-drawn cutter. After hours of riding around the countryside, he finally took out a small diamond ring and proposed. She accepted.

He also had a case of literal cold feet, for despite the love and cozy cutter mother said they almost froze. Besides her ring, she also treasured one of those heart-shaped candy boxes. There were lots of rough times, adjustments, four children, and difficult farm responsibilities, but the love lasted through a 55-year marriage until my father died in 1998.

Mother considered her wedding anniversary the most important day of her life and the most important day of the year. She never mentioned anything about her 25th wedding anniversary until after it had passed and wow did we children get in trouble.

We were now grown and busy with our own lives, children, and jobs, and somehow missed what we were supposed to do, which was to throw a big celebration party. We continued to make up for this transgression with many future anniversary parties until the big one, number 50. It was the hottest day of the year, nearly 100 degrees on June 17, but we shoved an air conditioner in a window and celebrated in the cooled farmhouse with plenty of food and barbecue from outdoors. We had offered a fancy restaurant, but they wanted to be home with friends and family for this one. After the meal, we left their generation to reminisce, and the rest of us got a tractor and hay wagon and rode to the pond up back for a swim and celebration of our own. It was a great day and was the celebration of what love is all about.