Broken Glass

I am sitting here trying to put words on this page that come out positive but for some reason, I am in some kind of negative spot. It all started with a mirror, a mirror I broke yesterday. It was my mother’s. It had sat on her dresser for years, a dime store kind of round mirror that magnified on one side and looked normal on the other. Somehow, and I don’t know how, it ended up on Elizabeth’s vanity without my knowledge until this past week, it was the little mirror that showed up in my blog on March 11, my mother’s birthday. It seems Elizabeth had taken a picture of it sitting on her vanity and it was the perfect visual for the entry. Curiously, she had been using it, for quite some time. It was a bit broken from the years of use so I brought it to the “shop” – a place where all the little things go to be fixed by the shop keeper, my husband. So, here is this little mirror that is very old and I didn’t know until just last week that it was even in my house. Anyway, after all of this,   I am, sentimentally attached to it and cherish it. I put the mirror under a basket in my kitchen cabinet where I keep loose recipes so that it can wait in a safe place until my husband could repair it. This is where the negativity happens. The phone rings and it is Elizabeth wanting to know the ingredients to a recipe that is in the basket. “Oh, ok, hold on a minute” – yep, I pulled out the basket and there slid the mirror right onto the brick kitchen floor – shattered. It was awful. This little irreplaceable manifestation of a memory that I just last week discovered I even had and was a physical connection of Elizabeth and her grandmother was gone. Elizabeth was not yet 3 when my mothered died so these things of hers are things I cherish all the more.

 Now for the message; it is something my mother taught me many years ago, and she didn’t even know she was teaching. One day I went for a visit, knocked on the door and walked in. There she was sweeping up broken glass. I asked her what had broken. It was her mother’s glass vase that had been  a wedding gift, one of the very few things she had of her mother’s. This vase had moved with my mother probably 20 times, from Ville Platte to everywhere in south Louisiana. It was about 90 years old and had sat in its last spot for more than 30 years – undisturbed.  On that day, minutes before, she knocked it over while dusting and it shattered as she watched. I, in my naïve age of ignorance concerning these disappointing realities of the universe, was upset for her. She, however, chose not to be – “I just swept it up like it was only glass”. It took years and experience to be able to speak those words – years of learning that “it was only glass” and like all things it had reached its’ end. I have to understand that. At that moment in my life I could not accept the limitedness of things. I thought people and places and things were forever. I had not realized that, up ahead, many components of my life would “go away” and only the memory would endure. She knew that then, she had said good – bye many times by then and she learned how to let it go. Now, I know.  I have drawn from that those few words she spoke incidentally ; they were with me as I swept up the glass.

 b u

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