Rock of refuge..

Collections

The past two days the humidity in Birmingham has been thick, my hair speaks it, the sticky feeling in every direction, and the looming overcast holding it's threat of rain. This week it's GOING to rain, it's also the 7th Mother's Day that I'll be remember my dear mom. In the Word, seven has always been considered, not a magical number, but referenced a lot. One of my mom's request was that we (my sisters and I) seasonally change her flowers and think about fun stories of her, especially on Mother's Day. She didn't want to think of us apart from her on this day. Until recently I hadn't realized how special this day was to her, maybe even more so than her birthday, that she'd mention it in her vision of not being here with us in the future. The picture (yes, a pile of rocks) above is a rock collection. Since I was little there's always been a fascination inside of me toward nature. After high school my parents rented a house on a beautiful lake, near even more beautiful waterfalls, several miles passed Camp Mac,just below Talladega National Forest. The house was surrounded by trees, hills, a lake below, and quietness. We would make family excursions to the waterfalls and walk in the shallow water, looking for treasures. Mother always thought of things to do outside, and hunting for beautiful rocks just to adore them was one of them. So now I have rocks that I've found from places I've been with their memories attached. A rock exported from a castle in Northern Ireland, the beach in southern Spain, the Dominican Jarabocoa mountains, the trails of Nepal, Charleston, Pensacola, Cheaha, North Georgia mountains, Andean village of Peru, and so on. Several years ago I closed the collection. This year in lieu of Mother's Day I'm going to write a letter, to my mom. Even though she'll never read it, her memory will always be here and there's so much I want to tell her. Perhaps it'll be more toward what I remember of her. The one thing that I think of often when I look at this pile of rocks it that there's a story behind them, a place, and especially a treasure of beauty that at just the right time I found, kept, and began thinking of what I wanted to remember.