Let Love Find You

Every evening during the summer of my sixteenth year, when the sun was that special kind of evening gold, I would walk the back trail that looped around the five acres of my childhood home. Along the far fence marking the back of our property, there were a line of trees that stood like the parting words of a book with a good ending. At the foot of these trees, grew a wild fuzzy garden of wishing flowers. Each day that I walked that trail, I would pick the dandelion skeleton and I would wish to fall in love by the end of the summer. I desired so deeply for a soulmate at such an untimely age; I was a small and hard apple not ready to fall from the tree. With each day that passed, and each wishing flower that died at the expense of my yearnings, there were no eligible suitors that swept me off my teenage feet, and love was nowhere in sight.

Every day that summer, when the morning sun shone with a fresh kind of glow, and as the heat settled into the day, I would read at the picnic table in our front yard. I would read under my favorite tree that stood high and full. I would read in the red velvet reclining chair that sat near the window with a view of my favorite tree. I would read stories about life and stories about love, and oh how I wished all the more for it. Words danced like ballroom pairs to the orchestra of inspiration and creativity within my mind, until one day the song in my mind became too loud, and I began to write. I would write into the late hours of the night. Every day I would write. I would write about my favorite tree and how I wished for love. I would write to God and about hardship and about my life through sixteen-year-old eyes. I would wrap up in a towel after a bath, the steam still twirling on the surface of my damp skin, and I would sit on the toilet lid and write about the moon that swam slowly through the dark lagoon of night. I would fill myself by day with words, guided by the sun. When the world was dark and asleep, I spilled out the words that filled my heart like the cricket song that filled the starry summer sky.

Drawing near to the end of that summer, when the heat was at its peak in August and the fluffy garden of wishing flowers was now a graveyard of half-pulled stems and weeds, the ghosts of fluffy seedlings settling into the dirt, I realized that I probably was not going to have a soulmate to walk with me into the fall. I sat among the dead, hopeless and misty-eyed, waving goodbye to my drifting desire. I reflected on the summer, on all my days spent walking this trail, reading my books, and writing into the early hours of the morning. Slowly, the dead and drooping stems grew alive around me in the inspiration of epiphany. They gently nudged at my heart, grew around my legs, the pappus danced in the air around me. I realized that I had fallen madly in love that summer, steadily and secretly. At the picnic table, under the tree, in my bedroom. Words consumed my heart: both the intake of them and the pouring out on my own spiral notebook page. There was a deep love that I knew would captivate my being forever. I knew the soulmate I met that summer would share love and life with me through all seasons, all stages, all spells. My wish had been heard by the ears of Heaven, by the God that knows me. I found a deep love that summer and learned more importantly that love does not only come in the form of another human. I fell in love with reading, and I fell in love with writing. And so here I am, finally feeling the boldness to share my love story, and share the words that fill my heart.