It was about 5 p.m. on Valentine’s Day afternoon when I hauled myself out of a motel pool, squelched over to the too-small towels on the white plastic chair and tried to dry myself and Teresa. “Someday,” I said, “she’ll know how much I love her.” There’s really not much I dislike more than putting on a swimsuit and getting into a hotel pool on a bitterly cold afternoon. Having the rest of the pool populated by 13- and 14- year-old hockey players doesn’t really make it much better. But for Teresa, and probably most 5-year-olds, the pool is the whole point of going to a hotel, never mind that the hotel is more of a motel, and less than an hour away. The one-night stay, on Valentine’s Day, was part of a President’s Day hockey tournament, and youth hockey doesn’t exactly make for a romantic environment either. Once upon a time, Tony and I went out for nice dinners on Valentine’s Day and gave each other gifts. Now we make sure Teresa has signed her name on 23 cards for her classmates, and Frank and I bought Valentine’s Day cards for the family at 11 p.m. Feb. 13, stopping at Target on the way home from, yes, a hockey game. And they say that romance doesn’t last. Seriously, marriage experts say couples need to make sure to maintain a romantic spark, spending time on their own relationship to keep it strong. Doing so, they say, will ultimately strengthen the family. That’s right, but what they don’t say is that when you have a family, things don’t always happen according to your schedule. Valentine’s Day, as a holiday, is more important to Teresa than to me, and if I can help her celebrate by catching her when she jumps in the pool, that’s what I’ll do. I don’t think I ever really thought about what the day would be like when we’d been married more than 20 years. I did know it was never all about the hearts and flowers that retailers break out sometime around New Year’s Day. St. Valentine, after all, is not the patron saint of candlelight dinners. He was believed to be a priest and martyr, beheaded in Rome around the year 270 for the crime of helping Christian couples marry, and he is said to have cured his jailer’s daughter of blindness. He is the patron saint of love, of course, and of affianced couples, but also of beekeepers, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, plague victims, travellers, young people and happy marriages. As such, spending his feast day on a family trip with our children, doing things that make them happy, seems to honor his memory. Even Caroline, who spent the day with her own friends, joined us for the evening. So happy belated Valentine’s Day to everyone. I hope it was filled with love, and the young people in your life were happy. And that no one has plague.