A lonely office

Sadness is saddest when quiet. When you find it inside a cold house, when love has learned late how to express itself.

Those winter Sundays
Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

To me and a couple of friends, the above is our go-to Father's Day poem. Regardless of season and kind of relationship, though, the poem speaks of the unglamorous, everyday—even administrative—nature of love.

As pointed out in this essay (about knowing when one is ready to marry), 'love' has two varieties: being loved and loving, yet we have this 'immature fixation on the former'. Whether we are children, friend, or the other half of a couple, we are guilty of this.

It does take work. Love's effects which are obvious to us may seem magical, but we must remember the momentary magic is borne out of meticulous planning and tedious practice. Not even a blood bond can warrant love's endurance.