Signs

A couple of nights ago, when I was feeling particularly down, I asked for a sign.  Something about the way the candlelight flickered on her urn, her beautifully fitting urn with its bright, colorful poppies…beautiful, just like her, made me feel almost other-worldly and I wondered if I asked out loud if maybe, just maybe, I could get some kind of sign…the kind other people always talk about but I never see and I wished.  I kissed her urn and went to bed hoping she would come to me in my dreams.

 I didn’t dream of her and nothing special happened until the next evening when I came home from dinner with my husband, Kenny. As I passed my dresser on the way to the closet I stopped suddenly in my tracks when I saw my mother’s pearls in their blue velvet box on top of the dresser. The pearls my grandmother had given to my mother and I’ve had ever since my mother’s passing. I’ve kept them in the back of a drawer in my dresser where I keep seldom used things as I am not really a pearl wearer and haven’t worn them or even thought of wearing them for years. I know for a fact, without a doubt, that I did not take them from that drawer. The only other person living at our home is my husband. After interrogating him for about an hour, to the point of making him angry, I had to begin to believe he was telling the truth. What purpose would he have for opening that drawer? If he did, why would he take and leave out the pearls and not disturb anything else in the drawer? It was a mystery.

Pearls…symbols of female generative power, the oyster the womb of the pearl. Pearls… symbols of purity, beautiful and rare. Pearls… found on the gates of heaven.

Was this my sign? What did it mean? How did it relate to Kirsten? A memory sprung to mind of Kirsten asking for pearls as a gift perhaps a year ago. I told her I wasn’t going to buy them for her, I didn’t see her as a “pearl girl” either and told her that she could borrow mine if she wanted to. I don’t think she ever did. Was that the connection?  Or were they chosen simply so that I would know it was a sign just for me?

Me and Mom

Maybe Kirsten is together with my mother (and possibly grandmother) in heaven…four generations of the maternal bloodline, like part of a chain… or a string of pearls.

 The next morning, as I leaned over the table full of candles on the altar at church, the candlelight from the one in front and center, which I lit in Kirsten’s memory flickered briefly on the strand of pearls hanging from my neck.