Take moment to cherish love on the rocks

I almost didn’t write this because it’s just the kind of thing that gets one labeled as soft and silly and romantic. It’s the kind of thing that gets you pegged as the modern equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse’s Madeleine Bassett, an empty-headed fool of a female who stared up at the sky and asked the clueless Bertie Wooster if didn’t he think the stars were God’s daisy chain.

That kind of silly.

But I found another stone today and that set me off again. So here goes:

I gather rocks. Not a specific type of rock, just any pretty stone that catches my eye. I especially love stones that have weathered, or been battered into the shape of a heart. Or something close.

Whenever I see one I immediately stoop to pick it up, drop it into my pocket and bring it home with me.

After years of this, heart-shaped stones are scattered around my house. They are piled on the vanity in my bathroom, displayed in a pretty dish on the table in the den or mixed in the clutter of books and notebooks on the table beside my bed. There’s one on my desk – somewhere under all that paper – at work.

It’s amazing how many heart-shaped stones you see when you train your eye. When you really look.

I’ve found them on the beach and snatched them out of the surf before they could disappear in the sand.

I’ve spotted them mixed in the gravel as I walked along railroad tracks.

My children picked them up in the cobble along the river and brought them to me, still warm from being clutched in a damp and dirty palm.

I found another the other day, half buried in the dirt beside an old house. That’s the one on my desk.

These plain chunks of granite and gneiss and agate, igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary souvenirs, some only barely resembling a heart, are my touchstone. They make me think.

Each time I see one as I move through my house, find one forgotten in the pocket of my jeans, or discover one rattling in the bottom of the washing machine, I am reminded to keep my own heart soft. And that’s not an easy thing to do.

We all know someone who has let his or her heart turn to stone. Who didn’t notice that the softest part of them had petrified and calcified and hardened until it could no longer feel.

I’ve seen that happen and I don’t want it to happen to me.

Most of us, at one time or another, have been bruised by trying to break into that kind of heart.

So I pick up bits of stone that have been chipped and flaked by others; tumbled and battered until they were reshaped – narrower on one end, round and indented on the other – and I carry them home with me.

And I put them out where I can see them.

Call me silly, like the ridiculous Madeleine Bassett. Call me a romantic. Like that’s anything to be ashamed of.

But one thing you won’t ever be able to call me is hard-hearted.