Glass from the Past

A package awaited me in my teacher mailbox at the end of the day on Tuesday. I opened it, pulled an envelope out of the bubble wrap, and found such richness: earrings, tumbled dump glass, and a note from a friend who's drifted in and out of my life since we shared high school adventures, some 40 years ago...

I walked through the halls reading Carolyn's card, smiling and sighing as we reconnected through her words. It turned out that we'd been reconnecting for a couple of months as she read this blog, discovering "little synchronicites" in our lives.

She bought me these earrings at a craft fair at Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes, a park I visited when we both were living in Ann Arbor. When I first moved to Michigan, Carolyn provided me housing and helped me find a job. The glass came from old farm dumps, dug up by women looking for "treasure" like old horse liniment bottles. They tumble the broken glass, smoothing sharp edges.

On Friday mornings 40 years ago, Carolyn and I spent the hour-long Cathedral service basking in the glow of stained glass, reveling in the beauty of the light, the music, and the language of the King James version of the Bible.


We liked to sit on the floor in the side aisle, leaning against Woodrow Wilson's tomb rather than in the rows of chairs set up in the main nave. 

That's where we'd like to meet this weekend while she's in the area helping her 87-year-old father move out of her childhood home. But the cathedral is still closed to visitors after the recent earthquake damage.

We're considering where else to meet.