the arrowhead

The Arrowhead

 On mornings when the news is thick and heavy, I turn to prayer, and scripture, to try to imagine heaven and remember my place in the light of eternity. It always helps. Some say Heaven is the best place we can imagine, where we hope to go - or go back to - after we die.  I've heard that Heaven is an eternal moment. Or a garden where time itself is kept out. I don't understand all the descriptions, but I cherish the words that...”In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…and said that it was good.”

Two weeks ago, on the morning of my wife's birthday, we took a walk at the place forever tied to her heavenly childhood memories. When she was a girl, and through her college years, her family had a beach house, on a tidal island, on the inner wrist of Cape Cod. After the divorce, her father and his new wife kept the place for forty years. But time took its toll, and they could not keep it anymore. When our turn came to calculate the costs of keeping it ourselves, with kids and cars, and colleges, and the perennial costs of one very old house, the decision to sell seemed clear at the time. Maybe it was a mistake. Honestly, I'm not sure.

 I do know that when her birthday came this year, there was no place she wanted to go back to more. Not to see the house, but to walk on the beach where she was young. We left our car near the bridge and took off our shoes as if we were stepping back onto holy ground.

 The morning was crisp with a late summer cold front that cleared the sky of almost every cloud. The northwest breeze was not cold, not really, but something in the air made it clear that the days of summer were almost gone. We held each other’s hands as she pointed out the "deep hole" lagoon where her grandfather had moored his boat, and the clam flats at the bottom of the dune where she played baseball with her cousins at low tide.

 The tide was coming in slowly as we strolled, and I listened. "I spent all my birthdays here. It was always in the last days of summer, just before we went back to school."

 I looked down at our feet, at the clam and oyster shells, and the scattering of glacial rocks ubiquitous on the Cape. Something bright in the wet sand caught my eye. When I bent down to pick it up, its pointed symmetry told me what it was.

 The arrowhead, shaped of quartz, was white, and even translucent near the tip as I held it up to the sun. It was almost perfect, as if the person who made it, and lost it, had been on the beach just yesterday.

 Suddenly it was in my own hand, on my wife's birthday, at her favorite place in the world that is linked forever to gratitude, and loss.  Somehow, they go together. I don't understand how, but it's true. 

Geologists say Cape Cod was left behind when a mile-thick glacier retreated ten thousand years ago. And in those days, all my ancestors, and all my wife's ancestors, and every single one of yours, was making a life and a living on the earth somehow - just as the person who made, and lost, this arrow thousands of years before we came into the world.

 The simple truth is too much to understand, and yet I accept it with a smile even on sad and confusing mornings. Ten thousand years is a geological blink. And ten thousand years is a forever number in the final lines of Amazing Grace. I pray that I'll have many more birthdays to walk with my wife, the mother of our boys. And yet, I know the number attached to those days is very small indeed. There are some truths I don't want to hold even for a moment.

 I gave my wife the arrowhead for her birthday. She keeps it now in her jewelry box of precious things. That its slightly worn down tip is still pointed and clear reminds me that every morning, even a hard one, is a gift.

 Blessings on your day.