February festival

This morning our dear neighbour's dear little girl brought me a gift -- the Valentine's card she'd made for me and my husband. Like this post, she was a bit late, but nevertheless welcome, as I hope this post will be. What a lift she brought to my heart.
Festivals mark the year with celebrations, but I've always had mixed feelings about Valentine's day, especially because of the increasing commercialization. However, along with that has come a widening of the festival of love which feels like a lovely thing (viz our card from the little girl). In the days when I was a teenager in London England, the approach of the 14th February filled me with a certain amount of dread. What a girl needed was at least a couple of anonymous cards saying 'be my valentine' and usually I received none. Luckily my best friend, who always got about five, didn't make a deal about this, and I survived.
Valentine's for me this year was a sunkissed trip up the Napa Valley on my first ever visit to California. Apart from the scenery, spending time with my husband, and enjoying a delicious lunch (courtesy of our son), we visited the Robert Louis Stevenson museum in Silverado. As a child, I wasn't much for his books -- even Treasure Island was a bit too scary for me -- but I loved his poems in 'A Child's Garden of Verses'. It was a special experience to see books, manuscripts, photos, paintings possessions of his, and to slip for a few moments into the famous Scottish author's life and mind.