Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my five-year-old son began making paper hearts. He had discovered how to make a perfectly balanced heart by carefully folding the paper first. There seems to be a metaphor here, but for what I’m not certain: maybe for love, maybe for the way my son approaches every task, perhaps for both of these things. Years later, as an adult, he will design and make models of water treatment plants, bridges, glass windows that are a full story high; he will marry a woman who sometimes wears a hardhat as she performs bridge inspections.
In 1989, at the age of five, he is making hearts. He uses up a package of oversized construction paper; he appropriates post-it notes, his father’s business cards, and his older sister’s loose leaf. He rummages in the drawer where I keep wrapping paper and cards from Christmases and birthdays and baby showers, and he begs for sheets from the yellow legal pads that I use for my lesson plans. I suggest in vain that he turn his attention to turkeys, pumpkins, horns of plenty.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my five-year-old son began making paper hearts. He had discovered how to make a perfectly balanced heart by carefully folding the paper first. There seems to be a metaphor here, but for what I’m not certain: maybe for love, maybe for the way my son approaches every task, perhaps for both of these things. Years later, as an adult, he will design and make models of water treatment plants, bridges, glass windows that are a full story high; he will marry a woman who sometimes wears a hardhat as she performs bridge inspections.
In 1989, at the age of five, he is making hearts. He uses up a package of oversized construction paper; he appropriates post-it notes, his father’s business cards, and his older sister’s loose leaf. He rummages in the drawer where I keep wrapping paper and cards from Christmases and birthdays and baby showers, and he begs for sheets from the yellow legal pads that I use for my lesson plans. I suggest in vain that he turn his attention to turkeys, pumpkins, horns of plenty.
Hearts litter the house. Tiny foil ones glint in the carpet and stick to our shoes; hearts made from graph paper and brown grocery bags surface among the dinner dishes and in the laundry basket; a lacy one falls out from a stack of receipts. There are miniature pink hearts and large green ones, hearts adorned with cakes and snowmen, hearts with stripes, and hearts with fragments of words that seem to speak in code. Hearts settle in the cushions of the couch, the corners of the stairs, and the pockets of our jeans. At night I dream that I am sweeping them up.
“Why hearts?” his older sister shouts at breakfast. One lies on the table, its pointed edge just visible beneath a box of cornflakes.
“I don’t know. I just like them,” he says. “Don’t you like hearts?”
“Of course I do, you stupid head,” she tells him. “It’s just not the right season, and besides, you’re making too many.”
“Too many!” his younger sister echoes.
He doesn’t answer either one of them. He has finished his toast and is experimenting with a piece of waxed paper.
On the day before Thanksgiving, waiting for the cranberries to boil and thicken, I stepped over a large yellow heart and plucked a blue one smaller than the head of a tack from a measuring cup. I am alone in the house. I use a heart made from a postcard (it says “eetings rom awaii”) to mark my place in the Metropolitan Cookbook, and I use another one—which seems to be made from the envelope of a letter from my sister—to jot down a list of things that I need to do, one of which is to check the guest bedroom for errant hearts. I’m sifting flour and still mulling over my list when I suddenly think of a poem by E. E. Cummings. I haven’t read it since grad school, but now the lines come quickly back: “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in / my heart).”
The words of the poem fall like grace. And these hearts that float and turn in the November air seem suddenly fitting; they seem, in fact, perfect.
- Carolyn Foster Segal is an essayist and a professor of English at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, where she teaches courses in creative writing and women's film.