Sealed with a kiss from the queen of hearts

OGDEN — It would have been easier, perhaps, to simply hand her husband a valentine at the breakfast table with a kiss every Valentine’s Day.

But Patricia Stott, ever the romantic, instead mailed Chad Stott’s card to the post office in Loveland, Colo., every February, so he could open an envelope stamped with a cupid’s arrow and Valentine’s Day poem from the “most amorous” city in the U.S.A.

On this first year without her valentine (Chad died of post-polio syndrome in September), Stott knows she will feel a bit melancholy, but she’s decided to celebrate her favorite holiday anyway. She plans to “pass the love along” to others who are alone or far from family and maybe haven’t received a card covered with hearts in a while.

“I especially like to mail valentines to elderly ladies who can remember a time when a handwritten sentiment meant something,” says Stott, 66, who lives in Ogden and has loved Valentine’s Day ever since she decorated her first box with red-and-pink crepe paper in the first grade.

“With everyone emailing or tweeting now,” she says, “I sometimes wonder: Will handmade, hand-delivered cards exist in the future? Will anyone tuck valentines away in a box like I do and save them?”

As Utah’s only member of the National Valentine Collectors Association, Stott will always do her part to keep the tradition alive. Hoping that a few other romantics might be inspired to join her “club of one,” she recently met me for a Free Lunch of spaghetti and garlic bread at Robintino’s.

Wearing a jacket in her favorite color — valentine red — and her dark hair pulled into a Victorian bun, Stott admits that she was born “100 years late.”

“I would have loved to experience that time of manners and perfect penmanship,” she says, making room on the lunch table for a few of the favorite antique valentines in her 200-plus collection. “Today, some schools don’t even teach kids how to write in cursive. How are they supposed to sign their names?”

She points to a pioneer-era valentine, embellished with scraps of floral paper, birds and silver lace.