Parents have things they say. This may have been obvious to you. Parents have things they say like mantras, and they end every conversation. “I love you” is one, though now that I write this I realize that that’s not something my parents actually say very often. They (we) say “Lovingly” right before hanging up the phone, or walking out the door. And we say it like it’s at least two words: “Love-ing Lee!” And as I was growing up, I actually thought that it two words and that it was a phrase that I just didn’t understand, yet…which is true, as I apparently didn’t know that “Love” had an adjective form at the time.
For some reason, I never questioned it.
It honestly wasn’t until my early 20’s when my mom and dad said it to me in the usual singsong voice we use when I had a vision of a handwritten not seen from the perspective of the writer, her quill pen just scribing the salutation…”Lovingly,” and I then realized what I had been saying for 20-odd years.
I still hear “Love-ing Lee”, though. And in my head I don’t think of “Lee” as a person, but instead the lee of a rocky outcropping, a safe haven in a storm.
No, I don’t know what is the matter with me either.