Good Things Return to Good People

...so the card says. It continues:

"...And so it goes with you. I came across this treasured vase of yours as I was packing to move towards the city you were moving away from when you parted with this piece. But now you are reunited."

I couldn't figure out who or what was sending me a box from New Jersey. The moment I saw the circular stripes inside the bubble wrap, I knew who the box was from. Barbara. Barbara! My vase! The vase!

The story of the vase goes like this. In college, $20 was a lot of money. A LOT. Several days of burritos. Even more of coffees. More still of proper dinners made from groceries from the market.

But one day, as I passed the vendors in the main quad, I fell in love, IN LOVE with a ceramic vase that sat among the handiwork of a local ceramic artist, on his portable wooden shelves. It was a long, lithe thing, dressed in blue-hued stripes in circles around its top to bottom. It was delicious. It hummed in my hands and I couldn't put it down. So I dropped the $20, choosing beauty over hunger for perhaps the first time.

Years of my love of this vase had it travel with me from city to city, until I was in New York and moving back to the West and realizing I had no place for the vase, and no heart to see it broken if it didn't survive the trip one more time.

So I gave it or I sold it to Barbara. I don't remember which. She had was just moving back to New York from San Francisco, where we had come to know each other. It was sad sad sad to part with the vase I had loved so dearly. But she took it and treasured it and understood its story.

And then, yesterday I open a mystery box to discover that Barbara, in her recent move, has found time and joy and inclination to pack it up and send it back to me. The vase.
What is that they say? If you love something set it free? If it comes back to you it's yours. If not, it was never meant to be.

I can't tell you the laughter from deep in my gut that came from seeing the stripes in their bubble wrap, the recognition of what was going on here, the remembrance of how freaking downright cool Barbara remains.

Thank you Thank you Thank you, little vase for finding your way back and Barbara, for the presence of mind and heart that understands the meaning of a few blue stripes and the history of a hungry $20.

Good Things return to good people. Good people return to good people. Thank you, Barbara.