Time had smoothed over the once deep scar in the ground with green grass, fragrant flowers and random weeds, but you knelt down, expressed a silent prayer and firmly placed your hands on warm mother earth. As you closely inspected you discovered that the wound remained hidden in the soil, the cracks and gaps had been washed with rain and sewn back together but the wound remained. With the constant motion from day to night to day the living age forward, but the cycling of the seasons cannot move by force of nature the memorial residue marked by an exact date. A sharp, painful memory stabbed at your selfless core, so you gazed up into the white clouds to simply, humbly ask, why?
The answer came slowly, as you stopped and listened, as you gazed forward into the summer horizon at the intersection, life sparked from a grand design cast across a pale blue screen. And the evening breeze whispered to encourage you to keep listening, and to keep searching for her within your reflections.
A spirit emerged from the darkness, beneath your shoes golden fire flies lit up the haze, and then you felt a gentle, familiar hug. A presence nudged you to faintly grin, and you smelled a favorite scent that perfumed the air. As you blinked your eyelids, a memory was released as if a motion picture across your mind’s eye to a meal, laughter, and the endless conversations about family, friends and third cousins twice removed. A blink, a single crystal tear as another memory transitioned onto the internal screen, winter, family and snow angles. As you glossed your thumb under your chin, you felt a scar from your first leap toward independence, a fall, and then the kind, soft hands that cleaned your wound, wiped away your childhood tears and encouraged you to think first, but to keep leaping. A blink and then the moment you returned from a mid-night sojourn with your best friend, and received the gaze of anger, and disappointment. But then there were those sounds, the happy boisterous laugh, the gravelly voice inflection to recommend another path, and the giggly, doggie cuddles. These are all the snapshots, happy or sad from a life engaged to live. And then you breathed in a full breath, blew a butterfly kiss into the breeze and returned toward your silent car.
As you strolled away, you glanced back as a bouquet of fire flies lit up your path, and you realized we are all destined to individually forge across our own branch in an eternal river with powerful one-way currents. But even so the unexpected cruel cuts left behind for the living reveals an inner truth that only God almighty understands. Perhaps from these scars wisdom emerges to remind us how the infection fomented after the wound, and the skin still marked by discolored tattoos that had been naturally salved over after the sting. But neither Heaven nor Hell can steal away, and forget what the living heart has enraptured within love’s timeless protective cocoon. The priceless memory shards like vacation picture postcards from a mother’s love are always there, patiently waiting to be reborn each time you think of her and simply, humbly whisper into the night, “I love you.”
NS
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