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.