Mary Ann Summers was more than a little morose. She liked many parts of her life on the uncharted island in the Pacific where she and six other people were shipwrecked, but she missed things she had always enjoyed doing at home in Kansas. Two things she missed the most were receiving valentines from her many suitors in her small home town and attending the annual Valentine's Day dance at the local high school of which she was an alumnus. With all days being virtually identical, she hadn't even realized the next day would be that most romantic of holidays until she heard a commercial on the portable radio The Professor managed to keep operable.
Gilligan heard the same broadcast, and it surprised and saddened him to see gloom casting such a shadow over the usually perky, smiling face of the pretty brunette. He was very fond of Mary Ann, especially since he had been fixed up with her by the matchmaker among the seven castaways. Besides the great sex he was enjoying with the sweet young farm girl, the best he had ever known, he genuinely liked her. Not being very sensitive about the moods and needs of women, he had no idea what the problem was, and wouldn't have known what to do about it if he had. However, he did know one member of the group of seven stranded castaways who would know such things, and he could ask her about it.
"Mrs. Howell, Can you help me? This morning, we were listening to the radio, and Mary Ann was her usual cheerful self until, all of a sudden, she became really unhappy. I don't know why, but I thought you might."
"Eunice "Lovey" Howell, wife of the wealthy Thurston Howell III did know what the problem was, but it was not from any shrewdness on her part. Less than an hour earlier, Mary Ann had told her in confidence how she missed getting dozens of valentines and attending the dance held annually on February 14. Nobody knew where she was and could neither send her the customary heart-shaped greetings nor escort her to the ball nor dance with her once they got there. She was not a gossip, at least in some matters, and would rarely violate a trust, but Mrs. Howell did know when to pass on confidential information, and she believed this was one of those times.
"Gilligan, Mary Ann is sad because..." She then went on to recount how much and why the pretty young woman missed her home town on Valentine's Day.
Gilligan listened and, oddly enough, he understood. Being the closest thing to a boyfriend Mary Ann had, he considered himself to be the person best suited to rectify the situation. Besides that, he took great pleasure in the mutual oral sex he had with her and wanted to do something to show his appreciation and affection. The problem was, he didn't know how to do that. He had no paper to cut into hearts and nothing to use to do the cutting. His sweater was red, but not dark enough and, even if he were able to cut it into the appropriate shapes, he would then have nothing to wear.
As for dancing, he was too clumsy to be any good at that, and the only source of music would be the radio, which was too important to the castaways to be entrusted to him. It was their only link to the outside world and The Professor, who had custody of it, would never let him use it or entrust it to anybody in his company. He and everybody else on the island believed, with good reason, that Gilligan would accidentally lose it in the deepest part of the ocean or drop it off a cliff or into the volcano. He very much wanted to do something, but did not know what.
Whenever Gilligan was perplexed, which was frequently, he walked by himself into the interior of the island. On that day, his thoughts were of Mary Ann, on her sweet disposition and pretty face and her surprisingly sexy body. Since the fixup by Mrs. Howell, they had frequently gone to a secluded part of the island and shared heavenly sexual pleasure, but strictly limited to oral. Mary Ann was a good girl and a virgin and determined to stay that way until her bridegroom took her maidenhead on their wedding night.
His wandering feet took Gilligan to their favorite trysting place, a small, flat stretch of land that overlooked the ocean and was screened from the interior of the island by a tangle of thick bushes. It had a southern exposure, and the soft ground would always be warm and comfortable to their bare bodies. There he stopped and looked around, hoping for an inspiration of some kind.
He found one. "Their place" was covered with soft grass, but the soil directly under the bushes that screened it from farther inland was bare and red. Not being a chemist or a soils engineer, Gilligan was not aware of how metallic compounds, such as those of iron, could color dirt, He just knew what was under the bushes was very close to the color he wanted for the heart on the valentine he wanted to make for Mary Ann. He went over to it, reached under a bush to scoop some up and sifted it through his hands.
"This is the right color," he mused out loud. "I wonder if I could mold some of it into a heart shape."
He tried, but the dirt had too much of a sandy texture, and would not retain the form he was thinking of. After a few minutes, he gave up on the idea and dropped the handful of sand. It landed a few feet from the bushes on ground that was a lighter shade than the dirt he had been trying to mold. Gilligan sat and stared at it and an idea came to mind.
According to legend, many great discoveries have come about because of lucky accidents. It is said that Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell from a tree and struck him on the head, and that Archimedes discovered his famous principle when his bathtub overflowed after he got into the water. So it was with Gilligan. The dirt he dropped landed on the ground roughly in a heart shape, and he realized he could use a larger quantity of the red soil and spread it on darker ground in the shape of a heart.
While still in high school, he had read about sand painting by Navahos in the American Southwest, how they poured colored sand and other materials into shapes on the ground or other surfaces. Gilligan had no artistic skills and no tools but his hands, but he didn't need anything else. The first thing he did was to go back to the open area overlooking the ocean and denude a small area of grass. The dirt there was loose; the grass pulled up easily, and he continued until he had a bare spot about five feet square, which he smoothed and firmed with his hands.
With the surface prepared, he started adding his painting materials. He made dozens of trips between the bushes and his "canvas," dumping double handfuls of red sand until he thought he had enough. "I can always go back for more," he told himself.
After smoothing those materials into a flat surface that occupied almost all the bare dirt he had exposed, Gilligan used a stick to draw the appropriate shape. It wasn't perfect, and he had to make corrections as he went along but, when he was done, the shape he had drawn was easily recognizable as a heart. Using his hands again, Gilligan cleared away all the sand outside the perimeter he had drawn so the red heart stood out clearly against the dark brown of the dirt background. He stepped back to admire his handiwork.
It was a good start, he decided, but it needed something more. Before becoming a sailor, Gilligan had sent hundreds of valentines and had even received a few. All those greetings included some kind of sentimental or affectionate message, and the one he had made for Mary Ann said nothing at all. Using the stick he had used earlier, he printed "Willy Gilligan loves Mary Ann Summers," using his full name that nobody ever used.
With the message printed, he looked at the valentine again. It was better, but the romantic words still did not stand out enough. That lack would be easy to correct, he opined, because there were millions of blossoms on the bushes and trees all around him, which was another of the reasons Mary Ann enjoyed going there for their sexual adventures. He set out to collect enough to press into the scratched out words and make them stand out.
"Written in flowers should be good enough," he told himself.
Only on rare occasions did Gilligan bare his head, and this was one of them. The small white and pink blossoms he chose were fragile, and would have been crushed if he had tried to hold them in his hands, so he took off his hat and used it as a basket when he collected the flowers. Once again, he made many trips, enough to gather his materials and insert them in the words he had scratched out but, when he was done, the valentine looked as good as any he had ever seen in a store. He was satisfied with what he had spent all day making, and hoped Mary Ann would like it too. It was already dusk, and time to join the others, but he would bring his sweetie to see it the next day.
