The stone we throw..

This one is simple. What do you leave and what do the people you leave do with it.  I'm certainly not certain about the cosmic plan, though I like, Einstein believe that deciding whether the benevolence of the universe is fact or fantasy is a driving question, perhaps as ol' Al said, THE driving question, which brings me to my grandmother. Not directly, today, on a social network,  my family and I inadvertently stumbled onto a moment of her life that remains unexplained.  A human skull…

We were cleaning out her barn after she died and my cousin Frank found it.  It was a barn full of her grandchildren gathered together for the sad and joyous occasions when we all came together to the same place as adults where we’d played as children to divide the objects of her life between our parents but as these things do, some of the material objects trickled down to our own hands through our parents and I began to wonder what we all use them for, how we remember her with their use and how my own children will remember me if they use objects for which I acted as temporary care taker, because the objects we collect are a story of who we are, whether they’re functional or more closely aligned with form.

We still don’t know who the skull was or where my grandmother acquired it, but Frank uses it to delight and horrify his beautiful daughters and in that, my grandmother delights and horrifies them.  She is still with them. 

For me, it’s so many things, but what sent me here was a cut glass perfume bottle which I filled months ago with sandalwood oil after being horrified myself at the cost, and delighted with the sensual experience of it in the air when I wear it.   It deserved a cut glass perfume bottle, and thus my grandmother lives each time I take a small portion of oil from that bottle and carry it with me through the day on my skin.

I’m not sure my grandmother would have said she lead a beautiful life, but I do know she left beauty in her wake, the same way a great ship does as it leaves the known of the port for the unknown of the openness. We'll all do that.  Our lives are stones tossed carelessly into a still lake, rippling outward to tiny corners we’ll never see, but we leave souvenirs of our travels.