Conversation hearts

You know those chalky little hearts we always get in February? Love 'em or hate 'em, they are a ubiquitous part of Valentine's Day. (I'm actually surprised there aren't things flavored like them, like there are lots of candy corn-flavored things.) With it being nearly Valentine's Day, I'm going to remember incidents connected with them.

In preschool, one day we were in the upstairs dance hall, playing around, and when we were done playing, our teacher gave us some with faces on them. (I noticed that was different, so I obviously had had them before that.)

When I was in kindergarten, I decided I wanted to do a Valentine's adaptation of Santa Claus, so when we were at Kmart one night, I wanted to get a bag of the hearts. I made stockings out of paper and drew hearts on them and stapled the front and back pieces together. I was going to wait until Valentine's Day, but I couldn't wait, so I got up really early one morning, when it was still dark and my siblings were getting ready for their school, and I put the hearts in the stockings I had made. I remembered seeing pictures of Santa with his finger over his mouth, so I did that, and then I asked Susanne if she knew why I did that. She said she thought it was because I was telling her to be quiet, but I said that wasn't why. I remember her saying the yellow ones were her favorite.

One January in 1998 or so, I was at Food 4 Less in Bountiful, the one by the no-longer-existing Five Points Mall. I begged my parents to get me a box of  them, and they did. There was another girl who got her mom to get a whole bunch of them for a party.

In third grade, my friend David Christensen gave me his valentine at recess, and it had a few "lacy" conversation hearts in it.

Another time, perhaps around 2000, our home teacher's wife, Ivy Petersen, was visiting us and said she loved conversation hearts and got them right after Christmas. But she didn't like the purple ones, saying they "taste like perfume."

On Valentine's Day 2001, I was at mutual, and I remember someone in another ward saying some girls had helped her decorate sugar cookies, and some of them had conversation hearts. I thought that was a horrible topping for a cookie.

In junior high, I remember talking with my friend Houston about how the white ones were our favorites. Around that time, my family bought a bag that was all white, but they were a strong peppermint instead of the mellow wintergreen in the regular mix. My dad loved them.

On Valentine's Day in eighth grade, I awkwardly gave handfuls of the hearts to girls from my ward as they walked past me on the bus.

One year, perhaps in 2005, I was dismayed that I hadn't had any conversation hearts, and my mom had only a few that she got from her class, and they were weird ones.

In 2006, I put a bunch of conversation hearts in a dish downstairs. Months later, they still weren't gone, and my nephew Preston (between 19 and 21 months) knew they were up on the shelf. He had his own language, with some words in English, some in Chinese, and some that he had invented himself. His word for candy was "ba." (My guess is that it was the way he tried to say "pop," as in "Otter Pop.") He would beg for "ba," so I would get one for him.

A few days after Christmas in 2007, on my mission, we had visited our investigator Cindy, and she gave us boxes of conversation hearts. I think they were of the "smoothie" variety. Perhaps that day, or at least very soon after that, we were out shoveling the driveway where we lived, and I slipped a little bit. I didn't fall, but somehow my slip hurt my ankle, and I felt like I had sprained it again. So I went inside and read on my bed while eating the conversation hearts.

I got some in a package from my mom in 2009, but I got transferred right before Valentine's Day, so I didn't eat many of them before I went to my new area. (I didn't want to take them with me.)

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2010, I was at Walmart with my family, and I got a bag. They were different from the ones I was used to, and they even had a blue one. That night I went to my dinner group in Provo, and the host had bought some cookies that were heart-shaped with messages on them. That led to a conversation about the candies, and someone said how bad they were, and I told them they had changed them and they were better.

In 2013, I put some ice cream-flavored ones in a jar in my apartment for a decoration. My roommate Cameron loved them, and one day I discovered one on the stairs outside our apartment, I think because our friend Carissa had taken some with her and dropped one. That heart was on the step for months. After he had eaten some, he bought two new bags--one was the ice cream kind like I had, and one was the large version of the fruit variety. He asked me which I would prefer him to put in (he correctly guessed that the ones I had were the ice cream ones); I can't remember what I said. Once Valentine's Day was over, I transferred them to a bowl, but then I quit eating them, and apparently Cameron quit eating them, because they sat in the bowl for months until I decided they were too dusty to be good for anything. (Come to think of it, it was around that time Cameron decided he was too good for us. So apparently he was too good for the hearts, too.)