photo by me

I was cleaning house today – one of those really good, deep spring cleanings where you move all of the furniture, flip the mattresses, get down into the areas where carpet meets walls kind of cleaning.

My house is nice now and I love walking in when my house is this clean. It makes me happy.

What is interesting about these kinds of cleanings is the things you find that you missed but then forgot about. I found two of those things today.

The first one was my favorite cup that I put chai in. It was clean but it seemed to have rolled under my bed somehow and I never saw it. Weird. I had wondered where it went and was mourning the loss of it.

The second was a little more important. I found a rock.

Now, let me explain a little.

I have a little bag full of rocks. It’s like a medicine bag and it was given to me several years ago as a gift and I started putting my collected rocks in it.

The first rock that went into it was a rock that my sister gave me as I departed to live in Britain. It’s a green rock with a hummingbird carved into it. The hummingbird is said to symbolize a messenger or stopper of time.

When she gave me that rock, I held on to it so tightly. I cried as she gave it to me. It meant so much – and still does. It’s one of those connections to my sister that no one can ever take away.

I wonder if she remembers.

I have a deer (love, gentleness, kindness), an elk (strength, agility, freedom), a buffalo skull (sacredness, reverence for life), and a spider (creative, pattern of life); all given to me by people who understood how much they would mean to me.

I have some clear rocks with words engraved: green (money) and blue (enthusiasm).

I have a buffalo fetish that looks like it’s made of the same red rocks that surround the land I live on.

I have a piece of sea glass from the Huntington Beach beach.

I have a black flat stone from a hike in the mountains.

And the rock I found today is a round black stone. It was picked up on a hike along the railroad tracks in Deep Bay, on Vancouver Island. Jonathan found it and gave it to me.

It has a groove in it that fits my thumb just right and it is almost like a worry stone that I can rub for good luck.

It had been on my nightstand and in my backpack during the time we were dating. It went everywhere with me – like it was a piece of him with me.

When things ended, I guess I no longer needed that stone to be with me every day and it didn’t follow me everywhere.

When I found it today, though, it was a joy. I rubbed it and smiled. It made me happy. It was like welcoming back an old friend.

It has gone into my bag of worn, treasured rocks.

My talismans. My connections to others. My links to a time and place in my life.