02/10/2026
Love this story!!!❤️🩷❤️
A Valentine’s Love Written in the Walls
Anna May was just 13 the first time she saw Gordon. It was on a tennis court in Cottonwood, California - an ordinary place that would quietly become the beginning of an extraordinary love.
By 14, fate had drawn him even closer. Gordon became best friends with her older brother, which meant frequent visits by bicycle, laughter drifting through the house, and Gordon disappearing into her brother’s room. Anna May, suddenly inventive, always seemed to find a reason to follow - an errand, a question, a forgotten something - anything that might bring her just a little near to him.
Before long, glance has turned into conversations, conversations into promises, and promises into something steady and sure. Through their first three years of high school, they were inseparable - Young love blooming quietly, confidently, as if it already knew it was meant to last.
Then Life intervened. Anna May‘s family moved to Oklahoma, and the distance broke her heart. Yet love, when it is real, finds a way. They wrote to one another faithfully, letter after letter, crossing miles of open land, carrying longing, hope, and devotion sealed with three cents stamps. Ink became their lifeline. Paper held their hearts.
As soon as Anna May graduated, she returned home to Cottonwood. And in July 1952, inside the Cottonwood Baptist Church, Anna May and Gordon were married - two young people stepping into a future they would spend the next 71 years building together.
Their life blossomed quickly. Four children filled their days with noise, purpose, and Joy. By the 1960s, Gordon built Anna May a home with his own hands on Bowman Road. It was more than a house - it was a promise, made solid in wood and nails. Within its walls, they raised their children, started a family, church, and lived a life grounded in faith, love, and shared devotion.
They remained their for decades, growing older together, loving each other in quiet ways that last longer than passion alone, through routine, Seifert and unwavering presence. That Home held everything.
When Gordon passed in 2023, after 71 years of marriage, Anna May say goodbye not just to her husband, but to the life they have so carefully built side-by-side. In 2024, she moved from their lifelong home to The Vistas, carrying memories. No one else could see.
But Love was not finished telling it story. The couple who purchased the Cottonwood house began a full remodel, stripping it down to the studs. And there. - hidden within the walls Gordon had built decades earlier, they found a box. Inside were Anna May‘s letters.
Every love letter, she had written to Gordon during their separation in Oklahoma. Carefully saved. Carefully hidden. Preserved and not in a drawer or a box under the bed - but sealed inside the walls of the home he built for her.
When the realtor placed the box in Anna May’s hands, she had no idea Gordon had kept them at all - let alone treasure them enough to build them into their home. The stack measured 8 inches tall, still bearing those three cents stamps. Love, quite literally, written into the walls.
Anna May held the letters close, tears falling softly as she reread the words of a young girl who loved deeply and a young man who never let that Love go. Even now, even after all those years, Gordon was still showing her who he had always been.
This is a valentines story, not about chocolate roses - but about devotion. About a love so steady and survived distance, time, change, and even death. I love that endured for 71 years and left behind proof - hidden, patient, and waiting to be found.
Because true love doesn’t fade. Sometimes, it stays quietly in the walls… waiting to remind us what lasting Love really looks like.
