In a time and place where “I love you” was only murmured in the dark in moments of passion or in the ache of parting pain, it reverberated in echoes of hammers pounding nails. It tinkled in the clinking of pans and dishes on wooden tables with thin-worn varnish. It rumbled in the sounds of four-cylinder tractor motors plowing at midnight. It clunked and cracked in the sounds of heavy iron and sharpened steel splitting fresh-cut sections of ash and oak firewood.

It spoke from the silence of worn denim overalls and cracked leather brogans. It draped over cotton rope clotheslines and smiled from glass jars lined on pantry shelves. It drifted in thin layers of gray smoke sifted through the cracks of smokehouses and dark-fired tobacco barns. It aged and cured in old wooden salt boxes. It roused itself from sleep on dark dairy mornings and walked across frost-crusted grass. It banked fires in the late hours after children were sleeping and made fires blaze again before the first light of dawn rippled beyond the low ridge.

In a hundred ways on thousands of days, love moved in the toil and duty of callused hands that worked the land, fed families, mended clothes, spread open King James Bibles, and kept a roof over all their heads.

In a time when words are spoken cheaply and work too often disdained, we must take great care in translating our own histories, lest we lose the meanings so painfully printed in the lives of those who surely loved us but never knew to put it into words.