Home is Where the Heart is...

I found these two hearts in the driveway right outside my apartment... I didn't have my cellphone with me, so I couldn't take the photo of them where I found them as I have been doing, but I'll forgive myself and my obsessive-compulsive nature just this one time. Something didn't feel right about going back out and "re-staging the scene" of the heart finding incident, and I didn't want to risk not finding them amongst the gravel of the driveway if I went to get the camera...

I heard today that Kelly has been noticing hearts now, too. She's not the first person that has told me that after hearing the story of Mom's hearts they have started finding them as well. I'm thrilled that Mom's energy/love/Force/spirit (whatever you want to call it) is still being spread around in this special way. It's the only thing that makes the horrible emptiness of missing her in any way bearable.

Back when I was in college, one of my ex's (Paul) ended up coincidentally being cast in a play with Mom, Dad, and Matt a few years after our relationship had ended. At the time, the irony and awkwardness added just the right amount of silly drama in my own little world, since this was my first "real" relationship and, as they often do, it ended with heartbreak. We had stayed in touch a little, but until I went to see the play (which, by the way, featured a scene in which Paul and my Dad's characters had a drunken slow-dance together) we hadn't really been close since it ended. Mom, Paul and I spent a lot of time together over the few weekends of the show (including a secretive late-night post-castparty drive that I won't commit to the permanency of the written word, but suffice to say we laughed a lot and had a major case of the munchies when we got home). Ever since then, Paul and I have stayed in touch.

So you may be asking what does this have to do with the cost of tea in China...

Well, Paul once told me that he loved Mom from the first time they met. (It was ironic, because we spent the duration of our relationship sneaking around to avoid having to explain who/what he was to me-- had the timing been different, he would have LOVED the in-laws.) He said that he found her easy to talk to and referred to her as "an old spirit" whose presence has obviously been in the world much longer than her physical body. It profoundly impacted the way I looked at my relationship with my mother, allowing me to see her, perhaps for the first time consciously, as someone other than "mom." She didn't let people in easily, but when she did she was fully engaged in that relationship. She had tons of acquaintance-friends, but relatively few deeply close friendships. I'm very much the same way. But Paul was so right about her-- she IS an old spirit, and I know that me finding the hearts is how the universe keeps me connected to her. And I know that the fact that some people that are important to me tell me that they find them now too is just the ripple effect of that love.