The sun was warm against her skin, the damp sand cool under her bare feet. She walked slowly, contemplating the immensity of the ocean and the timeless repetition of the waves as they crashed upon the beach; like tears of sorrow that faded into memories and turned, in time, to acceptance and finally to joy. She gathered little bits of brightly colored stones and shells as she walked, thinking of the years that had passed, and the miscarriages; the lost children denied to her, though they had lived, briefly, in her dreams. They had grown older and wiser, these unborn children, who surfaced like the tide; ebbing and flowing from her consciousness with the tide of her hormones. One day they might form a vivid and sorrowful memory, like a clock ticking their names in her heart; another day they might be a distant, disconnected image of someone else’s children playing cheerfully in the park. They were like the stones that she gathered, these memories; and she thought perhaps it was time to let them go. One by one, she set them down in the sand; the stones and shells representing lost dreams, lost hopes. She contrasted them as she placed them: bright, dark, colorful, dull, light, bright, dark, colorful, dull, light, bright and so on, deliberately forming the shape in the sand. When the last stone was placed and she stood back to view it, the heart shape stood out in hard contrast to the softness of the sand, a portrayal of her love; a bearing of her soul. When at last she turned away there was peace in her heart and a smile forming on her face, for there was her husband sitting nearby with his grown daughter, and a child, laughing and running straight towards her calling for “Grammy” to come and play!
