When giving gifts to those I love, I start by thinking about the person I am giving the gift to and the massage I want to convey. Sometimes the perfect gift with the perfect message comes across my path in a way that whispers "When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." - Paulo Coelho. One such gift came to me this past holiday season.
I started giving my daughter, Johanna, heart stones a few years ago on her birthday. She lives in New York and I wanted a way to both, stay connected to her but also to find a creative way to simply say “I love you“. I wrote to her every day for a month in a journal I created just for her, then on her birthday I gave her the journal and one heart stone, telling her I would continue sending these heart shaped stones when she least expected it, as a way of staying connected. She loved this idea so much she began to search for heart stones herself, telling me that someday she is going to make a mosaic out of them. We both began to have fun with this and sometimes exchange text phone photos showing our latest finds. In August, while on vacation on Lopez Island, WA, I found a special heart that would later be the ultimate gift of saying “I love you”.
Lopez Island beaches are mostly covered in stones. So while on the island this summer I began my search. Rob’s brother Dave, wife Lynn and two nephews Kie and Jaymin were with me when I found the first one. I shared that heart stones are all around us, all we have to do is look. Sure enough within five minutes they began to find the heart shaped stones. As we looked I told them how my children and I use to search for sea glass all the time when they were little and we lived by the beach in Plymouth, MA. Within a minute of telling them this story I saw a piece of glass sticking up between some rocks. What I uncovered made me gasp and had the rest of the group running over to see what I had found. It was the only piece of sea glass I have ever found that was shaped like a heart. Lynn quickly took a picture and we sent it off to my daughter with the text “Look what I found!”
I kept thinking about the heart shaped sea glass and wondering if I could make it into a necklace for my daughter. I began searching the internet for a sea glass artist. Then on my birthday, in September, I received a pair of sea glass earrings hand made by a sea glass artist from my daughter Johanna. I was amazed how we were on the same page of love. Within the next month I found an amazing sea glass artist while at a gallery opening for my friend, Encaustic Artist, Linda Cordner. Sonja Grondstra is one of the jewelry artists at the Pop Gallery on Main Street in Gloucester, MA. When I told her my story she said to send her the heart and she would try her best to get it to me for Christmas.
On Christmas day there was nothing more satisfying to receive a call from my daughter in New York saying how she cried when she opened her gift and saw the sea glass heart transformed into a work of art from a heart of love. “She said, It is my favorite, favorite all time necklace! Thanks Mom, I love it!”
