My child sees hearts everywhere we go.  We have both discovered them in leaves, rocks, and shells that I can think of.  I have amassed quite a collection of hearts from her — either from a walk or from something she’s brought home for me from school.  As early as 1239, the symbol we now recognize as a heart can be seen on the Bible Jesus holds in a mosaic in Istanbul’s famed Hagia Sophia.  The classic red heart as we know it today I am guessing is the universal symbol for love.  I was taking a walk through the woods near our home with my little girl when she said she’d made something for me.  Looking down at the ground, to my delight I saw she’d fashioned the word “love” out of sticks and rocks.  “I love you Mama,” she said and time stood still.  I could feel the wind gently lifting my hair, see the early morning rays of sunlight casting through the trees, smell the slightly damp scent of earth rising up to me, and hear the distant trickle of water flowing from the creek.  I had waited so long to be a mother and I am so very grateful to be one.  My parents may be gone, but I see my mother in my child’s full lips and my father in her impossibly long, jet black eyelashes.  I thought I knew what love was.  I was fortunate enough to have been cocooned in it by my parents my whole life.  Then, when my incredibly handsome husband asked me to marry him, I was blessed to experience a different kind of love.  I was taught in church about agape love, considered to be the love originating from God to man.  While I have been so blessed to have known any type of love at all, there is something indelible about the love between a mother and child.  I realize many do not get to experience that while others do and take it for granted.  So there we were, standing there together holding hands and my heart was overflowing.  Smiling, I looked down at my cherished little one and said, “I love you, too.”  In that moment I fully realized just how much love my mother had always felt for me.  The American clergyman Henry Ward Beecher once said, “We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.”  Standing with my six-year-old in the middle of the woods, I knew that to be true.  I am so glad I took this picture.  It is a cherished reminder to remember the moment.

When my mother was a girl (in the ’40’s) she told me she used to ride the trolly car alone to Fair Park to take art lessons in the summer.  All I can picture is what a different time it must have been when a ten-year-old little red-haired girl could ride a streetcar all by herself into the heart of downtown Dallas with no problem.  Now in the U.S. kids who are ten are not even allowed to ride in the front seat of a car with their own parents.  My mother had a true talent for art and was fond of replicating scenes from Audubon’s books of wildlife.  I never took art lessons and have no idea if I would have been any good.  This summer I sent our little one to an art “camp” for a week, which translated into a four-hour-a-day respite for me so I could work and at least pretend to keep up the house along with my sanity.  Our child likes to paint and has already been exposed to art classes early curtesy of the private school she is fortunate to attend.  I never picked up a paint brush in my life until I was 44.  A few years ago, to my delight, I’d won a silent auction bid to raise money for our little one’s church school.  It was an evening out for two to paint a scene of their choosing at an art studio with an instructor in a fun class.  I wanted to paint the Dallas skyline and hoped my husband would as well.  Sadly, he had zero interest so I invited a girlfriend of mine to go with me instead.  We enjoyed some Cab Sav and painted our interpretations of the skyscrapers downtown.  She is a professional art therapist but my friend was gracious and very laid back.  Her attitude was that art is not perfection; it is personal.  I really enjoyed taking the class and gained a small understanding of how relaxing creating a painting can be.  When my mother was a young girl, she hand-painted all sorts of birds on fragile china plates and cups.  She also painted two framed pieces which hang in our daughter’s playroom.  My favorite is the one she made of waterbirds.  Stalky white cranes, small egrets, and great blue herons are all perched on delicate tree branches overlooking water lilies blooming in deep, blue water.  The Irish critic George Bernard Shaw once said, “You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”  I find that particularly significant given how many different people view art in so many different ways.  Our daughter came back after the second day and presented me with my favorite — a wolf in blue.  This holds great significance for me and I know both my father and my mother would have been so proud.  Even if you have never tried before, I say it’s not too late to try your hand at painting … it may allow you a reflection into your soul.

Mama took me almost every weekday in the summer to our local library when I was a little kid.  She was a voracious reader and instilled the same love in me.  I was able to get lost in my own little world.  It didn’t involve watching TV and, mercifully, it was in the air-conditioning.  I remember they had a bulletin board for summer readers and each time you completed a book you got a star sticker under your name.  There was a contest to see who could read the most books.  I realized, despite my inherently competitive nature, it did not matter how quickly one could read; the joy was in the journey.  Even now I have been known to slow down toward the end of a book just to savor it a bit longer.  My sweet, quiet, lady-like little mother loved murder mysteries.  She read hundreds of them.  I think when I was a kid she read all 66 of Agatha Christie’s novels like Murder on the Orient Express.  Then I remember her adoring The Cat Who … series.  A Google search says there were 29 of those and the title that sticks with me is The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare.  After that I found she was into the Navajo murder series by Tony Hillerman.  I believe the first book was entitled The Blessing Way.  Mama was never without a book.  I suspect Daddy thought they may have been frivolous since they were fiction and he preferred non-fiction books on history and politics; my husband prefers the same.  I have been reading historical romance novels since I was ten; to be frank — they are sometimes referred to as “bodice rippers.”  I used to be SO embarrassed by the covers I would use something else to put in front of them.  I loved to read on my lunch break when I was working at Lord & Taylor in my early twenties.  A book is a treasure.  It is something in which one can escape whenever one is able and, unlike a movie, it is your own imagination that fuels it.  My earliest literary loves were the Madeline series (thrilled it’s now my little girl’s favorite as well) and the Frog and Toad books.  I do not recall having a suggested summer reading list until the second grade.  Now they have kiddos reading in kindergarten.  Our little girl is doing pretty well I think to be entering first grade this coming school year.  We have tons of books we bought to read to her as a baby, but I realized she has few she can read on her own.  So I broke down and bought her half a dozen “Step Into Reading” books.  To my delight, she has eschewed both the television and her iPad in favor of them.  Designating my bench by the window as her reading place, she has even had the nerve to “shush” me several times when it interrupted her concentration.  The American best selling author Sarah Addison Allen said, “Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories.  And there are still so many more books to read.  I’m a work in progress.”  I love this quote and share the same sentiment.  We’re all a work in progress … just keep reading.

I have been adding more music to my “library” lately.  Singing has always been a major part of my life and I love to do it whenever I can — from church to my car to the shower.  Being digital, I have all my beloved songs right on my phone, and I can take them with me wherever I go.  Making my own playlists brings me joy.  I have a playlist for songs all in French; one for classical music, sacred music, ballads, the entire soundtrack to the movie “Coco,” country, disco, hair bands, happy songs, inspirational songs, mariachi (my favorite next to the Latin church pieces,) songs I have “Shazammed” when I was not hip enough to know what they were, and work out music (which I need to listen to more.)  I love it when I discover a new song — even if it has been around for years.  In this case, I stumbled upon a ballad by the Judds, whom I have always liked.  The melody is lovely and the lyrics are bittersweet.  It is about remembering your childhood but not being able to really go back.  However I believe in some ways one can.  Some of my best childhood memories were the times when my folks and I went to the lake.  Daddy would sprawl out on one of his Grandmother’s handmade quilts and take a nap under the shade of a tree.  Mama would unpack our picnic and keep an eye on me as I searched for tadpoles, fed the ducks, and ran to swing.  It was an idyllic time and even as a little kid I seemed to realize it.  It didn’t cost any money but it sure was priceless.  The Fourth of July just passed and I brought a quilt for my husband, our little one and me to lay on while we watched the fireworks.  I had forgotten about the sounds of summer, the smell of the grass, and just looking up at fluffy white clouds against a dark blue sky.  I even broke down and let my little one have my favorite childhood pleasure:  Dr. Pepper.  It is the only soda I ever indulge in and, since I try not to drink it now, it, too brought back memories.  There was still a quilt enjoyed by one chocolate-covered head, one vanilla-haired, and one strawberry colored.  Only now instead of Mama and Daddy with me it is my husband and child.  I married a dark-haired man like my father and my little girl gets her auburn from my mother.  I’m still the vanilla.  My Daddy never wore shorts and neither does my husband really.  I used to love riding on Daddy’s shoulders and our little one loves to do the same with my husband.  The aforementioned newly-discovered Judd’s song entitled “Flies on the Butter” floated through my mind.  My little family is so much like the one I had as a child.  Just as I did with my folks, we were eating watermelon on the Fourth, laying on a quilt in the Texas heat, sipping Dr. Pepper, and waiting for the fireworks to begin.  The American novelist Louis L’Amour once said, “No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.”  I’ve never thought about it until now … perhaps that’s why they call it memory lane.

Joy is often found in the little things.  Since I refuse to use my wolf mugs for fear of breaking them, years ago I took to enjoying my morning cups of coffee with foxes.  Fox, after all, is kin to coyote, who is cousin to wolf.  My regular fox mug started to look gross no matter how much I cleaned it.  On a whim, I saw this happy fox in a catalogue and decided to get him.  I have always been a details person and often delight in the whimsical.  After Foxy arrived I confirmed he was indeed dishwasher and microwave safe as I waited for my chicory coffee from New Orleans’ Café du Monde to finish brewing.  I opened my little orange fox container and started out with my customary spoonful of “sugar” (Splenda.)  After I’d poured my coffee and added my organic hazelnut almond milk creamer I noticed something … at the top of my new mug, written in tiny black letters, were the words, “Wherever you are, be all there.”  I was completely and delightfully surprised to find the quirky script as well as the sort of informal mantra that greeted me.  So I did some research and learned the the quote belonged to the late Christian missionary Jim Elliot.  As I sat down to savor my first sip I found myself rereading the little words again.  I had no idea when I’d ordered it that it contained any type of quote.  I like to get going before my husband and daughter, so I sat in silence as I contemplated this.  It was just six words but they were packed with so much meaning.  I thought about my childhood and knew that I was definitely “all there” with my sweet parents.  But with the advent of my beloved iPhone, I realize it has made me not fully present in some ways.  While I have used it to record so much of my married life and practically everything our child has ever done, I do not feel that by documenting it I lost anything in the moment.  When I have not been “all there” were the times I just wanted to read instead of drawing with my little girl.  I have texted as I’ve listened with half an ear to my husband’s paranormal interests; yet he has read each and every one of my blogs.  I REALLY want to be fully present with my family, whom I love with all my heart.  I want to be more “there” with friends and strangers and places I encounter.  Dear readers, wherever you are, be all there.