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February already, and my theme this week is love. I stumbled upon Bernard of Clairvaux’s four degrees of love and it was enlightening. If you believe that God is love, there is no reason why He can’t be factored into the equation. To that end, I’m rating the stories I read by the degree of love they celebrate. Like a burn, first degree in the lowest level.

•   Excerpt from “This is How You Lose Her”, by Junot Diaz 2012

What does it feel like when your lover leaves you?

Like someone flew a plane into your soul.

Wow! First rate writing, but first degree on the love rating; could rise though—I have to get the book.

•  “A Love Transaction”, by Maile Chapman, Best New American Voices 2000 edited by Tobias Wolff

The title tells all. Love in the lowest degree, this interaction barely simmers at the desire for safety. Nameless characters, wary of each other, veil all things that might tug at the heart.

• “The Courting of Dinah Shadd”, by Rudyard Kipling, 50 Great Short Stories, edited by Milton Crane

It’s not surprising that Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling admired each other. In this story, an Irishman negotiates the wide river of war and women and falls under the curse of a hellion mother of a scorned daughter:

May ye see the betther and follow the worse as long as there’s breath in your body!

More romance flows from Kipling’s pen in the heat of battle than flowers in the heart of the cursed soldier.

• “Love in the Land of Loss”, by Caroline Leavitt, A Few Thousand Words about Love edited by Mickey Pearlman

Finally, the thermometer rises above first degree. After suffering the loss of her fiance Leavitt defines love as optimism, which requires faith. When love delivers her a husband and a son she lifts her eyes and says:

I’m loved. I get to have this, I keep telling myself in wonder. And then what I feel most is blessed.

• “Romance in the Roaring Forties”, by Damon Runyon

Dave the Dude makes plans to please his hotsy that sidestep plugging her new paramour. By not committing first degree murder he may have come close to achieving second degree love, but don’t tell him I said so.

• “Little Miss Marker”, by Damon Runyon

Because you can’t read just one, I read another Runyon story. Addicting. Sorrowful’s heart is touched by a little doll and his behavior changes radically. That’s got to be up there on the love scale.

• “Ordinary Life: A Love Story”, by Elizabeth Berg, Ordinary Life: Stories