As I stood in the candy aisle at CVS, selecting Reeses heart-shaped peanut butter cups, Dove caramel chocolate squares in heart-emblazoned foils, and Valentine’s themed Hershey’s kisses for treat bags, I experienced a major pang of missing my Mama.
Not only was she the best Santa in the world, (one who bought Christmas gifts throughout the year, whenever she saw something that she knew would be perfect for a certain someone), but she was also a giver of football-sized chocolate eggs or colorfully decorated chocolate bunnies at Easter. At Halloween, she used the top of her Tupperware cake holder and heaped it full of hundreds of pieces of candy to pass out to the dozens of trick or treaters in Westminster Park.
At Valentine’s Mama never failed to give my brother, my Dad, and me the most beautiful (and tasty) hearts filled with chocolates. She knew my favorites were chocolate covered nuts and caramels and always looked for that combination in the prettiest velvet or satin heart boxes she could find. Some were so pretty that I still have them almost twenty-four years after her death.
I was putting together Valentine gift bags for a ladies dinner with some of my high school classmates and for several close friends we planned on getting together with this week. As I pulled the box of colorful mesh bags I keep for such occasions out of the closet, missing Mama was heavy on my mind. I pulled off the large, thick rubber band that was holding the box closed and dropped it on the red formica countertop in the kitchen area of our printshop. (Yes, red formica … the house was built in the 1940s and the red formica countertops remain over eighty years later.) Looking down, I was stunned to see that it landed looking like this:
Wow! I thought. That’s either a heart or I am losing my mind.
I sat down at my desk and started divvying out candies into bags, still thinking about those velvet hearts and how Mama always went out of her way to let those she loved know it. Ten minutes into the process, I heard a scraping noise on the wall in front of me and looked up to see this:
That license plate, bearing my mother’s name, was given to me by my brother about fifteen years ago (when he replaced the tag on the 1965 Ford Falcon Futura that used to be my Mama’s and that became his at age sixteen) and the license plate has hung on the wall of my office ever since without mishap. Suddenly, the right hand tack fell to the carpet in the middle of my revery?
Smiling, I chose to believe both occurrences were messages from the other side. I truly hope she does see me; that she is proud of me. That was always my measure of myself growing up. If I was doing what Joan would do (my own version of WWJD?), I figured I was doing the right thing. If she was proud of me, I was over the moon. Her thoughtfulness was a blessing in my life and I love paying that blessing forward. Happy Valentine’s Day, Mama!
Robin's Eggs 