In an early scene in the movie Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’ character enters an exclusive clothing store on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles.  She’s a down-on-her-luck hooker.  Richard Gere’s character, an extraordinarily rich businessman, has handed her a wad of cash and told her to buy an outfit for the evening, but the store’s two saleswomen refuse to wait on her.  They pretty much throw her out of the store, telling her that she doesn’t belong there.  It’s painful to watch.  (Happily, there’s payback later in the movie.)

Roberts’ character enters the store oblivious to the scorn she’s about to engender.  But for some of us, visiting an establishment that markets pricey couture clothing is nothing short of terrifying.  I know, I know, you may have no idea what I’m talking about.  But class distinctions still shadow some of us.  I grew up in an immigrant family, with parents who turned frugality into an art form.  My mother had lived through World War II in England, and the deprivations of that time marked her.  (She would squirrel away leftover pats of butter in her purse on our rare visits to a restaurant.)  We were clothed from thrift store gleanings, long before it was in any way fashionable to forage for the vintage.  

The trappings of the well-off were foreign to me, and frightening.  I had no training in how to act in situations where wealth and advantage were taken for granted.  Nowadays, my life is very different, but my history remains intact.  As comfortable as I may be with my life now, I cringe a little at my belief that I’d still be horribly out of place in the halls of the rich and famous, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb.

And so, this week, I put myself to the task of entering a couture studio and having a significant interaction.  For years I’ve walked past the Luly Yang couture store in the graceful Fairmont Hotel in downtown Seattle.  In the picture windows, formal gowns ranging from the demure to the outrageous face the street.  These gowns are amazing.  Up to now, I’ve admired them from afar but I’ve never entered the store.  One of Luly Yang’s signature creations is in this store:  the Monarch Butterfly dress, a couture formal silk corset and petaled skirt that clearly evokes the butterfly.  It’s theatrical and magnificent.  I decided I would go to the store and ask to try on the dress.

Again, I know, some of you will think that this isn’t much of a new adventure.  But like trees, we bear the marks of our years inside us, no matter what our exteriors now show.  If you cut a tree in half, you can tell the years that the tree suffered from lack of water or environmental stress from the size and quality of the growth rings for those years.  Those rings never go away, even though they may be covered up with new robust growth.  Like trees, our past is always inside of us, always with us.  For me, walking into that store was just plain scary.  

The store is compact and quiet, with pale beige carpet and small glass tables.  One of the two saleswomen, both clothed head to toe in black, asked if she could help me.  I’m just here to look at your lovely dresses, I said.  She smiled and told me to let her know if I needed any help.

I wandered through the store.  Half the store is devoted to exquisite wedding dresses.  The other half is primarily for evening wear, of the very showy kind:  lots of satin.  I glanced at a few price tags.  Each piece I looked at was priced at thousands of dollars.

The original butterfly dress rests there, the central showpiece of the collection.  I chatted with the saleswoman about it.  She was friendly and charming, not frightening at all.  She told me that the they could customize a new gown like it for me, but that the original could also be rented.  In the end, I didn’t ask to try it on. I just didn’t want to, after all.

When I got home, I found I was curious about renting the butterfly gown—a purely theoretical curiosity, since I certainly had nowhere to wear it—so I emailed the store about what it cost to rent.  They responded that they had made a mistake and the dress was not in fact now available for rental, but that I could buy it for $25,000.  

Well, as you may guess, I’m not buying the butterfly dress.  ​

The whole experience, though, was remarkably empowering.  Analytically, I know that there is absolutely no reason why the salespeople would be cold or rude to me.  I looked perfectly respectable.  But inside I am still carrying that uncertain fearful girl in thrift store duds, devoid of  self-confidence, the girl who got picked on because of her funny accent and her bad clothes.  She’ll always be in there, a ring in my tree that’s a little shriveled and puckered, but today she has a hint of a smile.  

My self-imposed project of doing something new every week doesn’t necessarily mean that each week will bring a big exciting adventure.  

Such was the case this week, when my friend Susan and I subjected ourselves to our first timeshare presentation.

We had just rounded the final corner of an organized 5K walk when we spotted the freebie tents at the finish line.  We were helping ourselves to the usual bottled water, banana halves and protein bars, when we were snagged into a booth promising cheap vacation travel.  We were offered an amazing deal:  For a few dollars, we could spend two nights at a cushy resort hotel.  It sounded pretty darn good, but after we handed over our credit cards, I had a sudden epiphany.

“Wait,” I said, “Is this a timeshare deal?”

I’d heard horror stories from friends who had attended timeshare presentations.  They’d practically been held captive while a salesman pressured them to buy.  

The nicely dressed young man hesitated.  “Well, we’d ask you come to a two hour presentation about our program.”

We were both ready to snatch back our credit cards.  “Should we do it?”  I asked Susan.  “It’s only two hours.  And they can’t make us buy anything we don’t want to buy, right?”

We stood in the booth staring at each other.  “Well,” Susan said, “you haven’t attended a timeshare presentation before, so this could be your new thing for this week.”

That clinched it.  We signed up and got our information packets telling us where to go and when to show up, later in the week.  

When we arrived, it was very clear that this event was going to be meticulously orchestrated.  No, we were told, we couldn’t stay together.  Each of us would meet individually with our assigned representative.  

Our representatives led us to small round tables in a large meeting room, each table with two or three chairs.  In addition to Susan and me, there was a young couple with a small baby and a smattering of others.  I tried to take a seat facing the center of the room, but was firmly directed instead to take a chair with my back to the room, facing my representative.  

Steve wore a pink polo shirt that contrasted awkwardly with his very red face.  He immediately  peppered me with questions about myself, in staccato fashion, without seeming to listen to the answers.  What was I going to do this afternoon, what kind of dog did I have, how old was the dog, what breed is the dog, what are the traits of that breed of dog?  This, I assumed, was somehow designed to make us bond, but it was just weird and bewildering.  His questions turned to how and when I vacation.  As he made notes about my answers, he tried to fashion his pitch to fit my vacation habits, which was a near impossible task, since I favor group adventure-based trips.  When I told him I wasn’t interested in a timeshare, he repeatedly insisted that this deal really wasn’t a timeshare (even though the printed material I’d received stated in bold print that this was a solicitation of timeshare interests).  

We all faced the front of the room for a group slide presentation, focused on why this program was such a good deal, and the vast sums of money we would all save over the years by using this program for our vacations. It was an artful approach.  If you accepted all the assumptions that supported their conclusion, you could conclude that yes, this was a great deal.  But if you stepped back and thought about the unpredictability of where you would be and what you might want to be doing in the future, it really didn’t add up.

Then we went back into conversations with our individual representatives.  Steve seemed quite perplexed at my lack of interest.  Abruptly he stood up and turned me over to an older man with rumpled hair, who toted a fat well-worn notebook binder.  I noticed that this was happening throughout the room:  Team 2 was arriving on the scene.  

At this point Susan caught my eye and sent me the look.  You know the look.  She widened her eyes just a little, one corner of her mouth lifted just a tad, and she stared into my eyes for a beat or two.  What the f—, the look says.

I asked K why he was replacing Steve at my table.  He told me that Steve was new, and that he would be better at answering my questions.  I told him I didn’t have any questions.  He shrugged, and opened his binder.  It contained all the same information we had been given during the slide presentation, and I told him I’d already seen it.  K was much more aggressive and challenging.  Why would you not want to do this?  What can you find negative about this?  Why did you come here today?  He leaned across the table, essentially growling at me, and I wondered how this approach was going to succeed.  Was I supposed to be intimidated into signing up?  I looked at my watch:  We were closely approaching the two hour mark.

Finally, K slammed his binder closed and snarled, “Thank you for your time,” before leaving the table without a backward glance.  I was hurried through a station in another room where a financial counselor was ready to offer me payment information (“no thanks”) and then I was ushered back down to the reception area by Steve, who asked me to please rate him excellent on all categories of the exit survey.  If I didn’t, he told me, he wouldn’t get some accrued points that he really needed.  

Susan and I chatted for a few minutes out on the street before going our separate ways.  We’d both found the experience unpleasant, and neither of us had been tempted to sign up.  

I keep thinking about that young couple with the baby.  They seemed to be in deep conversation with their salesperson, so maybe they were considering buying.  I so hope they don’t do it.  The underlying assumption that life is predictable bothers me.  It’s not that we shouldn’t plan for the future, but I know all too well that the future is a fragile and amorphous thing, and it’s not going turn out just as you envisioned it when you’re in your twenties, part of a bright new family with a darling little baby, imagining about how you’re going to vacation for the rest of your life.  The future will include some curve balls that you’ll never see coming.   ​

And those two days at the resort hotel for such an amazing price, our prize for sacrificing two hours?  Well, it turns out that there are some restrictions that we didn’t hear about when we signed up.  Time will tell if we can even book our resort stays.  It’s a good reminder:  If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

(Moving forward into my second year of widowhood, I’ve committed to do one new thing—new to me—each week for a year.  It can be big or small, important or silly—but it has to be new.  It’s a way of reminding myself to focus forward, into my future life..)
​
    Sensory deprivation tanks, also called isolation tanks, have been around since the 1950’s, but now they’re called float tanks.  Floating in the tanks can supposedly reduce stress and chronic pain, by promoting deep relaxation.  Their inventor, neuropsychiatrist Dr. John C. Lilly, must have been quite the character.  He floated in the tanks after taking LSD, and by some accounts, discovered new dimensions and had encounters with aliens while floating.

    I wasn’t seeking encounters with aliens, but floating sounded like an interesting new experience.  (And, there was a Groupon deal, so it was pretty cheap.)  The company advertised  “Athletes, Meditators, and Creatives have been floating widely since the 1960’s.”  

    Back in the early days, though, the floater was fully immersed in a tank with a bizarre-looking mask that blocked out all sensory input.  This company’s pictures showed tanks that looked more like plastic clamshells—not exactly appealing to me, but not terrifying.  The tank water is saturated with epsom salt, and that provides buoyancy to keep a body afloat, even though the water is only about eighteen inches deep in the tank.

    The float company’s lounge area was clean, well-lit and smelled vaguely of the ocean.  While I waited, I was serenaded with the sounds of water burbles and faint strains of new age music.  On top of a large coffee table lay a book in which clients have written about their float experiences.  I leafed through the pages.  There were some sketches, some general accolades (“it was relaxing”) and a very sad, long entry by someone who was hoping “to turn his fake smiles into real smiles.”  I suspected he might need more than a float.  

    My favorite entry:  “This is definitely the most L.A. thing I have ever done.” 

    My attendant—enthusiastic and clean-cut, with a lean long-distance runner’s body—escorted me back to my float room:  a small, vaguely industrial space with an open shower, a place to hang and stack my belongings, and of course, my pod, which was emoting eerie green light and bubbling.  I was given my instructions:  Take off all my clothes (you do this buck naked), put in earplugs, shower and shampoo hair, turn off the room light and get in.  After I was settled in, I was told, I should hit a button on the tank wall that would turn off the tank light.  At that point, I would be in complete darkness and silence, floating in body temperature water.  I was to “just relax,” and when my hour was up, the light would go back on.

    I confessed that I was very nervous because I tend to be claustrophobic.  Not a problem, he said, once you turn the light off you won’t be conscious of being in a small space.  Well, okay.  I showered, stepped into the tank and closed the lid.  So far, so good.  I slipped into the water, or perhaps onto the water, moving my arms into a goalpost position as I had been instructed.  Then, I hit the button and turned out the light.

    It was utterly dark and immediately disorienting.  I floated, listening to myself breathe, for maybe five minutes.  Then, I decided I wanted to turn the light on briefly, just for reassurance.

    I couldn’t find the light switch.

    The float tank isn’t that big, but in any total darkness, disorientation is common.  I flapped and splashed around like a hooked salmon, slapping the tank walls, not panicked exactly, but close.  Finally I shoved open the tank lid.  With the help of just a shred of light from the room, I found the light switch.

    Whew!  Well, by my estimation, only about ten minutes were up, so I needed to try again.  Lie back, turn off the light…but this time I did take note that the light switch was very near the lever bar for the tank top, just in case.  

    I floated and tried to relax, but I found it progressively harder and harder to breath.  The humidity was intense and I couldn’t shake the impression that I was suffocating.  My brain went into overdrive:  “I’m suffocating, I’m running out of air, I’ll pass out and no one will know until the hour is up, and I could just die here…”  Definitely not the stuff of deep relaxation.  Nudging the tank lid open just a sliver with my foot, I let in a trickle of cooler air.  That, of course, lowered the air temperature in the pod ever so slightly, so that the air and water temperatures weren’t exactly the same, which is how it’s supposed to be, but I don’t think I would have stayed in the tank otherwise.

    I tried to enjoy the experience, and maybe I got close, for a time.  I didn’t feel weightless, but more like my body was supported on a hard rubber-like surface that was perfectly fitted to my body.  I never attained a sense of timeless relaxation.  If fact, when the light went on to let me know that my hour was over, I was relieved. ​

    After I’d showered off all the salt and dressed, I talked to the attendant.  He was clearly disappointed that I hadn’t been delighted with my experience.  When I told him about my breathing issues, he said there were runners’ breathing techniques that would help.  He asked me if I’d be back, and I told him that I’d have to reflect about that.  But really I don’t.  I’ll just chalk this up to a new experience, but not one I think I have to repeat.  If I decide to search for Dr. Lilly’s aliens and other dimensions, I’ll have to try another route.


    
    


    


    


    


    

    It’s been over ten months since Mark died.  As was predicted, the first year milestones have been hard to bear:  our wedding anniversary, Mark’s birthday, the date one year ago that we moved back into our remodeled house.  Facebook presents me with my posting from April a year ago, and I see the picture of Mark and me with our son, celebrating Mark’s last birthday at an Oregon beach resort.  Mark is frail in that picture, and I remember he had very little strength left, but even so, we weren’t prepared to accept the reality of what was to come, and soon.  Now as the anniversary of his death approaches, the memories of those last few months when he struggled and suffered are ever so vivid.  

    All the information from Hospice and the grief books told me about this, this first year gauntlet.  

    I don’t think time heals all wounds, but time helps.  It’s easier now to look forward, but sometimes I still have difficulty imagining a future without Mark.  I am routinely astonished when I realize that I will never see him again. His clothes in our closet still hold traces of his scent.  As I gathered the materials to prepare our taxes, the notes in his handwriting were unexpectedly touching.  He is still everywhere in my world.  

    One phenomenon that I didn’t anticipate:  I have entered a world of women.  Almost all my contacts now are with other women:  at my book group, at my volunteer job at a local women’s shelter, with a group that meets for lunch.  These women are fabulous, and their constant support has sustained me.  Yet, where are the men?

    Recently I had sat down with two groups of three other friends for meals.  It came to me suddenly that in each group, three of we four women were widows.  Have I entered the stage in my life when the men just start to disappear?

    But it’s not just that.  A few days ago, a new friend invited me for dinner.  When extending the invitation, she said, “My husband is traveling this week, so this is a good chance for me to have some women friends over.”  I went, and I had a lovely time and was happy to be included, but I  wondered:  Since I’m no longer half of a couple, am I relegated to women-only events?  I’m not trolling for hot dates, but I miss mixed gatherings.  

    This is nothing to whine about.  After all, in many older traditions, widows were disposed of quite handily.  I wasn’t required to throw myself on my husband’s funeral pyre and my relatives can’t tidily banish me to a convent to get me out of the way.  Even today, in many cultures, the rituals of mourning imposed on women are onerous and last for the remainder of a widow’s lifetime, regardless of her age.   

    But I’m finding that widowhood is not only a personal change in status.  It also moves me into another societal grouping, with new rules.  It takes a bit of getting used to.
    


    


    ​

I've been revisiting and revising some of my short fiction from years ago.  Here's a "sudden fiction" piece--not quite flash fiction (which is usually less than 1000 words) but a short short story nevertheless.  


Barricades

    Denny is far down the beach in front of us.  He has taken to doing this, lately, this striding ahead of us without noticing that his wife and daughter can’t keep up.  I focus my eyes on his back, willing him to turn around and wait for us, but he doesn’t.  From time to time he pauses, and looks far out to sea, but he never looks back.

    Michelle is singing to herself.  The sound of the rumbling waves from around the far point and the bite of the salt breeze delight her, and her cheeks burn to an almost painful shade of coral.  Sometimes she looks ahead to her father, but she doesn’t ask me why he doesn’t wait.  I don’t hurry her.  She swings her pail and shovel and stoops to pick up bits of wood, looking over each piece carefully and then tossing it away, as far as she can throw it.  Her pail is half full of rocks as smooth and rounded as lumps of resin.  She tells me she’s taking them back home as a present for Mrs. Whittaker, her second grade teacher.

    I rub a dull black rock between my fingers as we walk.  It must have dropped into the sea rough-edged and broken sharp, but then the sea rolled it and churned it and tamed it, taking away its special angles and points.  The beach is covered with smooth dull rocks.  Above the tide line the driftwood is mounded high, a long, pale frame along the rim of the ocean, all the pieces bleached to the same flat white, like the bones of huge beasts, long dead.

    Denny is still pulling ahead.  He is almost at the base of the cliff at the far end of the beach.  He looks young and strong from here, purposeful, walking like that.  I haven’t .,,,,,¬seen him move like that in a long time.  I wonder if he is angry with us, or maybe just with me, but I can’t think of any particular reason he would be.  I think about calling him to stop, but I am just too tired.  I sigh quietly, and Michelle slips her hand into mine.

    How can he move so quickly?  My legs already hurt from shuffling along the gravelly shore, my feet sinking into the gritty sand.  It’s a relief, though, not to have him next to me, cold and silent.  We were never good at talking, even in the beginning.  Now, it seems, there is nothing to say.  

    Denny is headed for the path up the cliff.  He probably wants to see the waves we can hear hammering the rocks on the other side.  They told us in town that we would find the sheltered cove here, one of the few places away from the high surf.  It’s cold, because the headland walls hold back the late afternoon sun as well as the full force of the sea.  

    The roars of the waves are everywhere.  I had suggested the Oregon coast for our few days away, though I hadn’t been here in years.  I  remembered the power of the massive breaks, the energizing raw raggedness of the wild coastline.  Now, though, it just seems unrelenting, a never-ending noisy battle between water and earth.  Even here, in this protected cove, I hear the rhythmic pounding from the other side of the cliff.  I keep glancing up, half expecting to see a gigantic crest breach the cliff and bear down on us, angry and spitting.  Denny has disappeared.

    I press the back of my hand against my forehead.  My eyes ache.  I couldn’t sleep again last night.  I stared up at the motel ceiling, listening to Denny’s dull snore beside me and Michelle’s deep steady breathing from the cot across the room.  As I lay in bed, I probed my mind the way you test an injured limb, moving it carefully, looking for the places it will hurt.  I wondered again if Denny is having an affair.  Someone hangs up when I answer the phone.  I’ve been to his office.  I’ve seen the way the women look at him, and look at me, and then look away.  They are fresh, sharp, new women.  He didn’t even try to hide from me the way he sucked in his stomach and strutted in front of them.  In bed last night I pictured him holding, kissing, making love to someone else.  I moved my mind in closer, carefully, slowly, to see his hand move over her body, his breath quicken, his eyes shine like they used to shine for me.  Still there was no pain, just a kind of numbness.  But it is not all numb.  There are still places I can’t go because of the pain:  I still can’t look at what is happening to us through Michelle’s eyes.

    Michelle is reaching for stone after stone, throwing them in the water.  She must have a target in mind, because she reacts to some pitches with gleeful giggles, others with a brief pout of disappointment.  The stones drop with deep plunks into the icy clear water.  She pauses for a moment and looks up to the cliff.  When she turns back she is biting her lip, but then she smiles at me.  I watch her carefully, wondering what she sees and knows.  I look at her a lot lately.  I can see no sign in her.  Maybe she is too young.

    Denny is standing on top of the cliff, arms folded, looking out to sea.  I stare up at him, rubbing my arms to keep them warm.  He turns towards us and lifts his hand.  I say, “Look, there’s Daddy,” and we both wave wildly.  Michelle’s face is glowing, beaming up at her father.  How do we look to him, as he stands on that cliff with the wild crashing surf behind him, as he stares at us far below on the shadowed crescent shore?  Michelle goes back to throwing rocks in the water, but I stand and look up at Denny.  He is too far away for me to read his face, but he stays turned toward us.  The sea wind whips his clothes into constant motion around him.  The wind might lift him right off the cliff and carry him away from us.  Suddenly I want to run up the cliff path to him, to stand next to him in that whistling wind.  I open my mouth to shout hey, anything, but the wind steals my words and eyes sting from the wind’s whipping and the raw rumble of the ocean is everywhere.  No matter how loud I scream, no matter how loud, the ocean and the wind will always be louder.

    “Mama!”

    I turn my face to her, and she stares anxiously up at me.  My eyes water from fatigue and the cold wind and it takes me a moment to see her clearly.  “Aren’t you going to help me?” she asks in a voice both wheedling and teasing.  She has started to dig a hole in the wet sloppy sand below the tide line.  “Help me build my castle,” she demands, scraping away with her pail.  Soft brown strands of hair escape from her pony tail and fly around her face like tiny banners.  I squat down next to her, and for a moment she leans against me.  I resist the urge to hug her close to me, because I know if I do I will start to cry.

    The sand is a mix of gravel and grit, and it’s sopping wet and oh so cold.  My hands are freezing, but the chill doesn’t seem to bother Michelle.  She talks to me as she scoops up the mucky sand and builds up the castle walls.  This is the tower where the princess lives, she says, and she makes one corner higher.  She smiles as she pats the gooey sand into place, and I wonder if she is thinking about Sleeping Beauty.  It’s the story we read most often at bedtime lately.  She cuddles under her covers at night and smiles at the ceiling while I read about Prince Charming, galloping through the dark woods to save Sleeping Beauty with a single kiss.  I always hold my breath for a moment at the end, wondering if she will be satisfied with “…and they lived happily ever after.”  It’s such a lame ending.  I wait for her to ask what it means, what happens next to the prince and princess, but she never does.

    I look at her, talking more to herself than to me as she makes the center hole bigger and builds up the walls.  She ignores the seeping puddle that has already formed in her courtyard.  She is absorbed in her task, self-contained.  I want to stretch my arms around her, and stand between her and the cold wind and water.

    I look up at the cliff.  Denny is gone again.  When I look back to Michelle, she is standing still, her lower lip protruding as she looks thoughtfully out to sea.  The advancing water is almost up to her castle walls.  The incoming tide is running strong now.

    She sits down on the sand with a splat.  “Mama, come on, we have to make the walls higher.  Come on.”  She shovels sand onto the castle walls in big sloppy mounds, laughing and scowling each time a wave comes closer.

    I start to warn her that it is useless, no matter what we do the surging water will defeat us, but then I look down at her upturned face.  She smiles at me, and for a fragment of a second we two are an entire universe.
​
    I kneel down beside her, and the cold wetness of the sand seeps through to my knees.  Grains of sand rim my fingernails as I dribble the ooze on top of the castle walls, making them stronger.  Together we shore up our barricades against the incoming tide.

    I just spent a week at a yoga retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii.  I’ve gone to this yearly retreat for decades, though I have missed some years, including last year when Mark was fighting cancer.  

    This is the second year that our yoga teacher has scheduled a week at a new location on the north end of the island.  The retreat house is slightly more rustic than your usual Hawaiian mega-resort hotel but is graceful and comfortable, with the feel of a sprawling Mediterranean villa.  The guest rooms are simple and painted in rich deep colors.  A stand of pines separates the back of the hotel from a a cliff overlooking the ocean.  Nearby a small herd of goats wanders and forages, and in our yoga room, facing the ocean, we can hear the occasional lowing from nearby cattle.  Colorful birds flit around the open-air dining area, hoping for crumbs.

    And nearby there are special stones…

    According to local lore, King Kamehameha convened his council in the ravine that is now a short walk from the hotel, to develop his strategy for uniting the islands.  There, a ring of irregular massive black stones, half buried in the earth, circle around a mound.  Other stones dot the rolling terrain, including a special grandmother stone which sits apart from the council group.

    I was told that this is a site where the veil between worlds is very thin.  The stones, they say, speak, give counsel.  It is best, we were told, to approach the stones with a question.

    I am of many minds about these types of beliefs.  I am a skeptic, but I try to keep an open mind.  After all, holy sites exist all over the world, representing a plethora of religions from the well-established to the obscure.   Miracles and answered prayers are their mainstays.  The Catholics have Lourdes; Buddhists make pilgrimages to the Tiger’s Nest Monastery; the list goes on and on.

    I was curious.  How do the stones answer?  Did they put words in your head or mumble on the wind?  Would there be a vision?  Would it be like the Oracle at Delphi, where an obtuse phrase would be delivered and might give an answer, or might not?

    A fellow yogini who seems to be very intimate with the stones approached me after breakfast on one of our last days.  “The stones told me that you should go down,” she said.  “I’ll go with you and show you the stone that is special for me.”

    Well…okay.

    I admit to entertaining some irreverent thoughts at that point.  I envisioned the stones with cartoon talking balloons over their heads, saying things like, “You tell Steph to come on down.”  But it really didn’t seem like an invitation I could refuse, so I followed her along the rutted grassy path down into the ravine.

    I leaned back and settled against my stone where she had directed and left me.  Did I have a question?  No, all I had was the familiar bruising jagged ache that has accompanied me since I lost Mark.  The morning was fine and breezy, the rock face capturing the warmth of the sun.  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.  The world came wildly and fully alive, with the chittering of birds, the rhythmic cooing of doves, the buzz of insects.  Wind rustled the grasses, and I could hear the distant groan of farm equipment engines.  After about twenty minutes, I strolled back up the path.  Well, I thought, no stone conversations for me.

    And yet…something changed.  Since Mark died, every recollection of my last hours with him, as his breath abandoned him and I sat, stunned, next to his lifeless body created a sharp stab of pain that was almost impossible to bear.  I think I was having a post-traumatic stress reaction, because these memories came with a rush of adrenaline and horror.  But after my visit with the stones, just then, I realized that I could remember those hours with sadness but with a new  peace.  It may not sound like much, but it was a tremendous change.

    So did the stones do this for me?  Or was it the entrancing Hawaiian setting, showcasing the vitality of the life of the planet all around me?  Or was it my week with loving, joyful, accepting people?  I don’t know.  I just know that I am healing now, and that, in itself, feels like a miracle.