Bleeding Hearts
Cedar chips carpeted the foot trails through the Alderwoods, the Cedars and the Firs. With each step we hesitated, we found ourselves studying what lined the outside of the trail. There were irregular shaped logs caped with deep green moss; ferns were reaching their arms towards heaven and clustering themselves into a community. It was like a lush green carpet had been spread across the forest floors.
Her small fingers were warming themselves in my hand.
At an offset on the trail there sat a lone concrete pillar bench; seating space only for two. We sat. There was no need for words; silence filled our space.
When we returned to the trail, her little fingers found comfort back in my hand. As we came upon the meadow, steam was rising up from inside of the earth where volcanic rock had settled in the late 1700s and the sun filtered through the naked spaces between the 100 foot timbers.
We had finished our nature walk through the Timber Ridge trails. Eden took her hand from mine. She tilted her head; her eyes were focused on the olive green blanket of moss on the full-size boulders and she whispered. “Oma I love Bleeding Hearts.”
There was no more conversation.
Quietly I sat window-side after she had gone, my mind curious to what she loved about bleeding hearts. Does she love them because they bear heart-shaped flowers from which a drop of blood dangles at the bottom? Or does she love to pick them and drape them over her ears as earrings. Is it her fascination with the Bleeding Heart fairy tale story about the prince and princess - where the princess finally realizes, after it was too late, that she truly did love the prince, and cried and uttered repeatedly, “My heart shall bleed for my prince forever more!” and her heart bleeds to this day. Or is it that she just loves how these miniature hearts grace the gardens full of elegance and beauty? Or does she enjoy pressing them between the pages of a heavy book to have paper-thin little hearts. Or holding the flower upside down and pulling the two halves apart and imagining that she sees a lady in a pink bathtub.
I wonder what pulls at her little heart-strings to love these valentine shaped flowers that are housed in a fernlike bluish-green foliage?
For me, Bleeding Hearts remind me of 'loss love' for those who have gone before me.
