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Valentines; mysterious and otherwise

I received three valentines today.

The first is the image, above, of a red stylized heart on a white ground. This image has been plastered all over the windows of my little city's downtown businesses for years and years. No one, or very few, know who the mystery lover is. But that just adds to the pleasure of coming downtown to the red and white love-liness of it all. 

The second was an orange shasta daisy (with a sprig of greens) given to me by my dear next door neighbors, fellow college alums, renters to me of my studio, and artists, not necessarily in the order. A gentle surprise and shining with pride of place on my kitchen butcher block table.

The third valentine I just discovered when I went over the studio to give my friends a reciprical valentine and to retrieve my water bottle from my studio. I was carefully walking across my very icy driveway when I saw a large piece of paper attached to my mailbox. What could it be? From a distance it didn't look like an ordinary advertizement. Ah, no, not an ad at all!

Actually, it's a limited edition valentine from my favorite small press printer - Kelly, of mayday studio. If you squint you can see she only made 15 of 'em. Such a select group! So sweet of her to think of me! I can't remember the last time I enjoyed Valentines Day so much.

Is it finally coming true that once I've let go of expectations I actually get what I want? I woke up grumbling a bit "Oh, yeah, it's valentine's day, whoopee." But I didn't expect anything from anybody (I had even momentarily forgotten about the downtown plasterer). So it's been pretty sweet saying Happy Valentine's Day and being greeted with equally friendly returns.

If you're reading this please consider yourself officially bestowed with a personal valentine's, from me.

Love,

Eva

links and some thoughts on being a Jew & antisemitism

I'm linking to this site: Its All Connected and this site: Alas a Blog both posting and taking comments about antisemitism. The author of this series of posts, titled "What We Talk About (and don't talk about) when we talk about (and don't talk about) antisemitism and Israel" is Richard Jeffrey Newman a published poet, writer, translator and educator. RJN is currently working on #5 in the series, which I look forward to reading whenever it goes up.

I've been following the posts and occasionally, briefly, commenting since they started to go up on January 19th. They were inspired, in part by this post by Julie at (and cross posted at Alas a Blog) Modern Mitzvot: Why I've Stopped Talking About Gaza which, after some of RJN's posts and many comments inspired this: A Gentile Priviledge Checklist

I've been riveted by these posts and have a lot of thoughts but nothing I've attempted to write, in the comments sections of a number of the above posts, says what I want to say. So I thought I would start by posting here, on my own blog, that I am following these posts. 

I think that's all I can write even now. Everything I write sounds strange and not quite it and so I will just have to wait until I write something I don't immediately want to delete. Wish me luck, and if you're interested do have a look at the links above. Thanks.