She Beads Stars And Her Name Means Lively and Quick

She beads stars.

She sent some of those stars for my ears, light-shot blue chalcedony dangling from dancing gold so that they swing from my ears like a piece of morning sky when the sun is coming up over the sea, like one of the seven colors of the sea itself in Cozumel.

She did that.

She knows I love this book and so she sent me a copy she's had forever, an advance reading copy sent to booksellers and I don't even know- Allegra- were you a bookseller? As well as a jewelry maker, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, the mate of B. Loved?

I know so little about you, dear Allegra. I only know that when you started commenting on my blog, your words shot tiny pellets of truth and light into my heart and started my mind buzzing and my soul said, "Yes."

I found her blog and there she was, her words and her images and her thoughts and her strength, like the delicate-looking earrings dancing from my ear lobes, but which are strong and firmly held together by purest gold wire.

I fell in love, which is something that happens here in this blog world. Sometimes. You just know. This person is my sister. This person is my brother. This person is my mother/child/dance partner. This person is someone I need to know. And perhaps I have been looking for her my entire life and here- here she is. I've have dreamed her and had forgotten. Oh, how could I have forgotten?

She sent me that book, those earrings and something else. She saw that I am in a play and I need a romance writer's negligee. "Ah ha!" she must have thought, even though she is in what she describes as hell from chemotherapy and she found and packed up a negligee she's had for a long, long time. One that Doris Day may have worn in a movie, probably she did. Yellow, like the sun on a daffodil. That yellow. And she wrapped it in yellow tissue paper and put in plumeria sachet and the earrings in a blue Tiffany box wrapped with a pink ribbon and the book which needed nothing, it has all the words in it.

Then she wrote me a note and tucked that in too and she sent B. Loved off to the Post Office and he mailed it all to me and that package traveled from Portland to Lloyd where Joann our Post Mistress handed it to me and I took it home, my heart beating a little faster because I knew it held treasures.

Oh Allegra- as I told you- I don't know how to graciously accept gifts. But for you, I am trying. These stars you beaded will be dancing from my ears for the rest of my life, two jewels of your own light will always be with me. This shot-of-sunlight negligee you sent will be the best thing onstage, my bosoms resting where Doris Day's once did. The book you sent will be read and reread and stored on a shelf in my library.

And people will ask me: Where did you get those earrings? Where did you find that negligee?

And I won't know where to begin.

Well, you see, there is this woman that I know. Well, I don't really know her. But I love her and she sent them to me. Her name is Allegra.

Allegra- I don't even know what you look like. I could pass you in a hallway, I could stand next to you in an elevator and I would not know it was you. But I know that I would look at that woman in the hallway, on the elevator and I would say, "My God, she is beautiful. I wish she was my friend. I wish I knew all her heart-secrets. I wish...."

And you would turn to me and smile and there you'd be. My heart would know who you were. It would turn inside of me and you would smile and say, "I like your earrings."

And I would reach up to touch one of the smooth stones and I would whisper, "It's you. You beaded these stars, didn't you?"

And then finally, our hands would meet. Our hearts already have. A candle burns for her night and day in my library where that book will rest.

And all I can say is thank-you, Allegra, from the bottom of my crazy heart.

I love you.