Valentine's Day Stake

He carries two kinds of arrow, and only one of them is the good one.

Ovid worked this out two thousand years ago. Cupid's quiver holds arrows tipped in gold, which kindle love, and arrows tipped in lead, which drive it off. In the story he uses both on the same afternoon — gold into Apollo, lead into Daphne — and everyone involved is worse for it. He was not, in the older tellings, a sweet little thing. Greek Eros was a full-grown god and one of the oldest forces there was. He shrank into a chubby child somewhere in the Hellenistic period and never grew back.

Two of them hang on this branch, bows drawn, with the heart between them and an arrow already through it. Whether that arrow was gold or lead is left to the buyer.

The heart itself is a puzzle nobody has settled. It looks nothing like the organ. One theory has it descending from the seedpod of silphium, a plant the Romans valued and used up entirely; another says ivy or water-lily leaves. Take your pick — it has meant the same thing for six hundred years regardless.

The American part of the holiday starts in Worcester, Massachusetts. Esther Howland saw an English valentine in the 1840s, thought she could do better, and built a business making them by hand with a crew of women working at long tables in her father's house. They called her the Mother of the American Valentine.

Set it where the light comes through it — over the walk, on the tree out front, above the door.

Specifications