Mary’s Angel

I fixed my broken garden angels. Two had heads returned to their shoulders, and the other was mounted and made ready for cemetery duty. As I look at them, two need more work. That tall one requires a wider base. It’s top heavy, which accounts for its many tumbles in the garden. I’m investigating my options. The one going to the cemetery needs a bit more sealing around its seat on the limestone. As for the third, there’s a story.

I was getting ready to put it back into the garden and turning it over in my hand thinking about where it should go. As I did, I looked at the bottom to see if it was suitable for adhesive and noticed a tiny bit of writing. At first, I thought it said May 1987, then I realized it said Mary. That made sense. It was a gift, maybe for a birthday, perhaps Christmas, or a housewarming. Finding a month and year was nice on its own, but finding the name was special. Mary was one of my wife’s roommates, and she was the girl who answered the phone when I called the day after we met.

She and her husband now live just down the road in Boerne on the Guadalupe. There’s picture on the fridge of her and her husband with my wife and I at a corporate party. Suffice it to say we stayed well in touch. So, given the little angel’s travails in the gardens of our lives, it’s missing a wing tip, and its place in the memory cycle, I’m retiring it. It now has a spot on the hearth with the manager scene and will remain there, sitting on a small block of stone, its hands folded in its lap, its head slightly bowed, but no longer broken, safe and warm, a little window through the vale of tears into a happy past.