love is in the air
A Valentine’s Day tale with everlasting devotion
“It wasn’t done as a test. It was just playful and fun — and loving.” ť CARMELA CUKIER MINDEL ABOUT THE SECRET VALENTINES HER MOTHER SENT TO HER FATHER years
Every year for 35 years, Wanda Cukier would mail her husband, Jurek, a Valentine’s Day card — usually one with a saucy message like “I may be hard to take, my pet … But I’m not hard to get.”
She usually signed the card with only a question mark and she never acknowledged, all those years, that she was the sender.
Still, her husband, as curious as he was pleased, suspected her.
“No,” she would respond. “It’s not me.”
But she would smile as she said it, recalled Carmela Cukier Mindel, the eldest of the couple’s four children. Carmela was 17 when the first valentine arrived, and she remembers wondering: “If it’s not my mother, who is it? Is there a secret admirer?”
Her father was in his mid-40s at the time, “and I think my mother wanted to bring a bit of spice and fun into their marriage,” she said. The couple had moved many times since marrying in Romania in 1944. They came to Canada in 1957 and settled in Montreal. It took time to acclimatize to their new life but by 1963, the year the mystery cards began to arrive, Wanda “was adjusted to life in Canada and she had discovered Valentine’s Day,” Carmela said.
Her mother valued playfulness “and she valued making her man feel important.” And the valentines “made him feel young and desirable and interesting,” Carmela said. “It wasn’t done as a test. It was just playful and fun — and loving.”
Many of the cards “were provocative, sexy — avant-garde for the time,” she said.
Like “If you think you can make a pass at me and get away with it … you’re right.” Or “All men are beasts! … Lucky for you, I like animals!”
Others were simply sweet: “It was easy finding a Valentine that says ‘I love you’ … but finding the right person to send it to took me a lifetime.”
With every valentine, Wanda would ask a store clerk to address the envelope — that way, the hand- writing varied. Then she would mail the card to the house.
And each year, when the card arrived, her husband would ask her if she had sent it. He would ask the children if they had. He would check the handwriting on the envelope for clues. “It didn’t dawn on him that she would ask someone to address the envelopes,” Carmela said.
Jurek noted the date on each card and kept every card and envelope in a bedroom drawer where he placed other precious possessions.
The cards chronicle everything from changing fashions and evolving greeting-card designs to rising postal rates: postage on the early cards was just four cents; on the 1997 valentine, it was 45 cents.
When Jurek was about 80, the valentines stopped; by then, it had grown difficult for Wanda to get around.
“And at that point, she admitted to him that she had been the one sending them,” Carmela said.
“He called her his little witch — and he laughed about her secretive and playful style.”
After Jurek’s death in 2006, his wife took his seat at the table.
She would look at family photos and tell stories about him. She felt close to him, she would say.
Toward the end of her life, her mother “was losing the light, bit by bit, and turning inward,” Carmela said, but her playfulness would surface occasionally.
She died at home, Carmela by her side, in February 2013.
As the family historian, Carmela has the Valentine’s Day cards. She wanted people who were important to her mother to have access to them, too, so she chose 24 that were similar in size, paired them with their accompanying envelopes and had more than 100 copies made and bound into a small volume she called Love Is In The Air.
She had the book made “in memory and appreciation and valuing of my mother’s and father’s relationship,” she said. In addition to the cards, the volume features the story of the mysterious cards and a short biography of her mother.
She had it made, too, because of something her mother liked to say: “Nothing dies that is remembered.”