The Romantic.com

Care Packages

QUEEN OF CARE PACKAGES

submitted by: Anastasia

 

I must send care packages to my love about once a week, and letters more often then that… here’s a few things I’ve sent recently, outside the usual baking, (Which he gets just about every time.) and sealed letters (which I send because he loves getting letters sealed with sealing wax, he was enamored with it from the first one I sent. Who knew just owning a seal could be so important?).

He was really rather ill a few weeks ago, at home and what not, and when I talked to him he said that he loved getting my letter, but that he had to read it “a paragraph at a time” because he was getting so ill that things were clouding over for him, and even comprehending a sitcom was becoming difficult. So, when I wrote the letter for that week, I wrote it, instead of just onto the paper, I took nine note cards (little ones, that I discovered were a smidgen too small to mail on their own) and wrote about a paragraph per card. (So he could open them whenever he wanted to) Each card was about a reason why I’d kiss him, so I grabbed a few Hershey’s kisses, and replaced the little flags with ones of my own that reflected the reasons, and taped them to the outside of the envelopes. I included a tenth kiss taped to an index card, with the note “for reasons yet to be determined”. He said it was great…it came in little bits, so he didn’t have to feel like he was leaving bits out, and plus, he said he loved the look on his family’s face. (They seem to always want to know what’s in his packages….)

Since the relationship between my love and I that eventually blossomed into the one we have now originally started at a conference we were both attending, and I’m more of a shutterbug than he is, I have a picture of, what you could call the spark that started everything. (We were taking a group shot, and he decided to rest his arms on my shoulders. We very much clicked from there, and stayed up the whole night talking) When I got my prints developed, I got a wooden frame, carved the logo of the conference into it, and put the photo in. (To go with all the other shots of conferences he has up in his room). I sent it to him along with all the other snapshots from that same evening.

He was studying French, and I’ve been speaking French since I was 5. It was becoming very difficult for him to get the grades he wanted on the dictation parts of his exams. So, I went to the Education Library at my university, picked up a book of French dictations, and set up my computer with a microphone, and recorded a CD of dictations for him. I then copied all the texts out and sealed them into individual envelopes, so he could open them after he’d tried to write out the dictated paragraph. I sent them to him in a package, along with the CD, and a few of his favorite treats to munch on when he did well on the exercises.

My love had recently admitted to an ‘accusation’ from a friend of mine that he spent all of our time together (which, living far apart, is precious little) looking, and seeming to wait for me to laugh or smile. It was hard for him to do, but I thought it was sweet. So, I baked him oatmeal cookies and put smiling faces on them with the M&M baking bits before I baked them, and made him a ‘box of smiles’. Except I replaced one of the cookies with a round book I’d made out of yellow paper (roughly cookie-sized) full of reasons he made me smile. He kept the book, and still talks about it.

I get to see my love soon, and he’s very excited, but a little worried he won’t be all the way well by the time I get there. They say “laughter is the best medicine”, so I’m sending him a package of toys (little toys, a Koosh ball, one of the super-bounce balls, some bubbles, a fortune-telling fish, magic tricks, toy animals, a bunch of the little dissolving capsules that have little foam animals inside them, a glitter bomb…I’ll pick up a pinwheel, and some candy) to keep him laughing, to be accompanied by a joke every day by e-mail until I arrive, that he’ll be able to share with his family.

He’s always impressed by the random questions I come up with to ask him (“Who’s your favorite animated snack character?”, “If you could go back in time to do one thing over again, what would you do?”), and always answers, lets me answer, says “I guess it’s my turn”, and then feels bad because he can’t think of a question. So I went and purchased “A Book of Questions” for him.

I get told often I’m his Princess, so I’m going to the children’s book store and I’m going to pick up a princess finger puppet, and mail it in a package with crown-shaped sugar cookies, decorated with the little silver balls and jewel-toned candies, so that he can have a “Princess” with him even when I can’t be there.

In the very early stages of our courtship, we went out for ice cream at Baskin Robins. We very nearly chose the same flavors (I ordered his second choice by chance, he ordered mine), so I convinced the owner of the local Baskin’s here to let me have the little cards they use to identify the flavors of ice cream, one for each of the flavors we ordered that day. I sent them to him with a tiny ice cream scoop, gift certificates for ice cream, and a promise that next time, we’d grab the ice cream and then come back to eat it on the porch watching the sun go down.

We’ve both got a touch of wanderlust, seeing the world is high on the list of goals for both of us. And he likes thinking about future adventures, especially ones where we can see castles. So I went down to the art supply store, and bought a blank puzzle, painted a picture of a castle on the front, and wrote a message on the back of it, about an adventure we’d have exploring the castle.

The both of us enjoy a computer game called Civilization 2, but play with different strategies. (He wins the game by having the most money; I win the game by having the most science and technology) He got a package containing a “communiqué” from my head of state of choice to his (we both tend to pick the same character every time we play), containing an invitation to a “state reception” (I made him dinner), and then a meeting “to discuss our mutual visions for the future of this world”. He told me he couldn’t stop laughing when he got it, but he managed to send me back a letter, in keeping with my game, saying that he would be ever so honored to attend the reception, and that he looked forward to discussing future plans, saying he hoped to “Establish a permanent alliance”.