I Carry Your Heart - E.E. Cummings
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
It has long been a tradition in my family to make two-toned Valentine's Day cookies. For this project, my mother used to prep our rolled sugar cookie dough by first mixing the ingredients in her KitchenAid, and then dividing the dough into two separate balls -- one to be dyed red, and one to be dyed pink. After being dyed the dough would then be chilled in the refrigerator for hours until it was ready to be worked with. We would cover our entire countertop with waxed paper and flour (although, when working with children and rolled cookie dough I really like to use a clean vinyl tablecloth over the dining room table to maintain a bit of personal space) and then my mother would roll out portions of the dough for each of us. With two heart shaped cookie cutters, one about twice the size of the other, she would cut first a large heart out of the red dough and then a smaller heart to be removed out of the center of the dough she had just cut. She then had one of us do the same with the pink dough. She then carefully placed the pink smaller heart inside of the large red heart, and did the same with the other. Our "hearts" held each others'.
Yesterday I decided to pass along this tradition to my stepchildren. They were home from school for the first of two snow days (I feel another project coming along today), and it seemed like the perfect opportunity to share with them something that I loved as a child. We spent hours mixing, chilling, and cutting our dough with great success and minimal bickering :) After all of the cookies had cooled Caitlyn and I bundled up and trudged through the one and a half feet of snow and delivered our heart cookies to the neighbors. You can imagine their surprise to see the two of us running through the streets on one of the most miserable days of the year to deliver our Valentines!
The children may not realize it now, but in deciding to share their "hearts" with our neighbors I can slowly see them becoming the type of people who will share their hearts all year round. That's my hope, at least.
