Morning Glories, Peaches and My Kaitlyn’s Spirit

Some of you might remember last October when I told of the one single purple morning glory that we saw in the brush/wooded area in our back yard that was surrounded by nothing but dead brush. It was right there all beautiful and perfect and purple. What was so special about this is that I had never in the 26 years we have lived at this house seen any morning glories anywhere near our house, including that area. Also there were no more morning glories around it at all. In no other part of the brush or wooded area around our house, nowhere. It was all by itself in the middle of deadness. I took this as a sign from Kaitlyn. For one, she loved purple. For another reason she wrote a poem about morning glories (that was a metaphor for something else). I took it as a sign from her.

Well this year that very same brush is filled with purple morning glories and never has been before. But the brush is still alive because it is August. And this morning Allyn and I noticed morning glories in the top of our one remaining peach tree in our back yard. But they are blue and small. We’ve never had morning glories in our peach tree before. It is one of our remaining 3 peach trees that is half dead and I am so surprised when it continues to put out peaches each year. Fresh peaches was one of Kaitlyn’s most favorite fruits to eat. That tree just continues to hang on putting out her peaches…..and now it has morning glories. (I’m not worried about the morning glories killing the tree….I expect that tree to completely die at any time).

I don’t see Kaitlyn in the distant tree line across my house anymore looking beautiful, dressed in a black dress ready to go to the opera, or symphony or play as I always did each time I went outside, which is often. She’s no longer there, watching me, worrying about me…I know she was. (Don’t worry about my sanity, I know it was not really her), but that vision is gone now. I no longer have visitation dreams from her. I have had 5 beautiful visitation dreams from her that started a few months after she died and the last one being in February. I feel like she has gone on to where she had to go, but she has remained and always be in my heart and soul and memory. And somehow she sends those thousands of dragonflies to my yard every single day…..at my front door, at my back door, they fly around me everywhere I go….to my doctor appointment in the parking lot the other day, to my appointment to try to get the volunteer job last week…..they flew all in the back parking lot as I watched them from behind the big window there. She knew I loved dragonflies and bought a porcelain tea kettle with dragonflies on it for me before she died.. And she has sent the morning glories…..knowing how she wrote about them and what she meant by what she wrote….the morning glory was a metaphor for her and her life.

I will always remember her and love her and savor the signs that I get.

In my last dream about her she got onto a tram with other young people to go somewhere….and I think that place was heaven.

The soul never dies. I’ll see you again Kaitlyn

“Falling Into Being

You, you with the clovers in your hair, your braided sun beams.

Flowers and winged things. How you’ll never know the species of them, but you know them by their colors–their tiny reflected sunlights. You call them cousins by their hues:

this one is robin red, this one is lily white. You touch them with your bluebird eyes.

What is the final truth, then? Is it that they live, that there’s beauty in existing as you are?

Before the sun had risen, you cupped your hands around your mouth and whispered to the spiraled bud of a morning glory: why will you bloom?

No answer until the morning, and then it unfurled its petals; its greeting to the day, to a lifetime.

You sat and watched this little being bloom with the magnificence of purpose. It was beautiful in its silence, in its pride.

You gave it the honor of breathing softly, of acknowledging its vulnerability. You knew it was weaker, less protected as a softly petaled bloom than as a bud.

You saluted its courage.

And when it died in the dusk of fading lights and fading colors, you stood in reverence as you do at the funeral of a man who lived well. Shed a tear but smiled in acceptance of a gift you never intended to receive.

And by morning, you had discerned the colors of yourself. You had fallen into being.”

By Kaitlyn Elkins

I Saw Kaitlyn in My Dream This Morning (update at end)