Stacked Stones

My mother, whose birthday it is tomorrow, has a certain centered quality, a kind of self-containment that I can never adequately describe. At its worst, it renders her implacable, but most of the time it makes her indescribably capable and calm, the person you'd want by your side in a crisis of any proportion, a stabilizing force for people like me, who tend toward anxiety and chaos.

I realized today, while spending a few golden hours at the beach with my family, that I have always assumed she was born with this quality, which she shares with her brother more than anyone else. While I still think this is true, I am now thinking of all the ways she cultivates this way of being. I realized this because inspired by her birthday, and my desire to give her something I knew she would value, I followed her lead on the beach.

For all of my life, and surely longer than that, my mother has loved the ocean and beaches--islands, especially--more than just about anything else. An isolated beach is an ideal setting for my mother's brand of tuning out and turning inward, and although my sister and I both inherited large doses of my father's more manic neuroses, as well as his more extroverted personality, she has passed this love on to both of us.

Part of her relationship to beaches has been through shells and shelling, but more recently she has turned to stones. About ten years ago, she gave us all little Asian wooden boxes which, when opened, contained about six smooth, flat beach stones that could be stacked in a pile about four inches high, the largest on the bottom, the smallest about the size of a penny stretched oblong.

What are these? we all asked, until we began stacking them, the stones themselves soft and comforting under our fingertips, the act of stacking somehow soothing and satisfying at the same time. This summer, she began collecting stones again for these little collections, tiny Zen projects, and as I finished my lobster roll up on the sand today, I could see her sifting through piles, searching for more.

So instead of reading the book I'd brought, which is what I have done on every other occasion when my mother has been searching for shells or stones in the past, I rolled up my jeans and headed down to the water's edge myself, in search of some stones for her.

I had promised Lily I would help her find "rainbow stones," six same-sized stones in hues of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, which I did, relatively quickly. With that out of the way, I began hunting for the long, flat stones my mother is favoring these days, but on a slightly larger scale. The stones under my feet and in my hands, running through my fingers as I sifted, in my clenched hands as I walked, took prominence over the task at hand. Although I didn't lose sight of my goal--to find a tower of my own to give my mother--the finding of these six stones in particular did not seem urgent. I somehow knew I would find them; I somehow stopped searching so hard.

I don't know this intuitively, this need to stop searching with urgency. In fact, to slow like this and see only the stones in my line of vision is counter intuitive to me. I gave my mother her stones after dinner, wrapped in tinfoil, along with six rainbow stones too. I don't know what she made of my giving her a gift she'd invented, that she'd already given to me. I don't know if she knows that I'm trying, one smooth stone at a time.