Rock blessing

The other morning on our walk I spotted a blue heron in the marsh. I stopped and dragged my friend Liz over to the break in the trees and when it finally moved, she saw it as well. She wondered how I had even spotted it.

Because I was supposed to!

As we were ending our walk, we crossed a trestle bridge (the path we were on is called the rail trail, which as the name implies, was where the trains used to go) and I heard this gawdawful screeching sound and stopped to see what the racket was about. Two blue herons were not happy about us being there, or something, and after a lot of screeching they flew low, over the water, in the opposite direction. Then they landed. Two very cool sightings, and quite significant in that I was in search of my Power Animal.

We were also screamed at by a pair of blue jays, and when we passed by them, Liz spotted a rock that looks exactly like an egg. She picked it up and said something about it looking like a bird's egg, and after a few moments she handed it to me and said it was mine.

I cradled it in my hand for the rest of the walk, waiting for it to warm up in my grasp and perhaps let me know whether or not I was supposed to keep it. I did, and then put it on the shelf between the seats in the car. And in essence, forgot about it.

This morning I was driving Charlie(who is almost 15) to school and he spotted the rock and asked me what it was doing there. I explained the above and waited for "that look," you know the one, where your children are mulling over the possibility that they TRULY must have been adopted because how could they have possibly come from YOUR crazy ass loins?

But it didn't come. Instead he said, "I hope I marry someone exactly like you."

Completely touched I asked him to clarify what that meant. Because he wasn't prepared to answer it because clearly his declaration came straight from the heart, after some thought he said that he liked how I knew things. Further prompting and he said like when I walked into a house and knew that it was the right house. Those were his words, but I knew he meant so much more than that -- and I had to blink back tears as I thought to myself that the rock had given me more than I could have ever thought possible.

It's not something to be over-thought or parsed. It was its spontaneous simplicity that gave it its truth. The only thing I can think of to say, which is completely unlike me and I even hate writing it because of its cornball sentiment is that ...

I am blessed.