Here's how to play:
*Grab your current read,
*Open to a page,
*Share a few “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page,
*Please no spoilers!
*Share the title and author.
From Cheryl Strayed's 'Tiny Beautiful Things.'
"Dear Bewildered,
Several months after my mother died I found a glass jar of stones tucked in the far reaches of her bedroom closet. I was moving her things out of the house I'd thought of as home, but that no longer was. It was a devastating process--more brutal in its ruthless clarity than anything I've ever experienced or hope to again--but when I had that jar of rocks in my hands I felt a kind of elation I cannot describe in any other way except to say that in the cold clunk of its weight I felt ever so fleetingly as if I were holding my mother.
That jar of stones wasn't just any jar of stones. They were rocks my brother and sister and I had given to our mom. Stones we'd found as kids on beaches and trails and the grassy patches on the edges of parking lots and pressed into her hands, our mother's palms the receptacle for every last thing we thought worth saving.
I sat down on the bedroom floor and dumped them out, running my fingers over them as if they were the most sacred things on the earth. Most were smooth and black and smaller than a potato chip. Worry stones my mother had called them, the sort so pleasing against the palm she claimed they had the power to soothe the mind if you rubbed them right.
What do you do with the rocks you once gave to your dead mother? Where is their rightful place? To whom do they belong? To what are you obligated? Memory? Practicality? Reason? Faith? Do you put them back in the jar and take them with you across the wild and unkempt sorrow of your twenties or do you simply carry them outside and dump them in the yard?
I couldn't know. Knowing was so far away. I could only touch the rocks, hoping to find my mother in them."
"...across the wild and unkempt sorrow of your twenties..."
I'm trying to think of the last time I heard a description like that. That's exactly what it was but I never knew how to describe it.
