Finding Center

About three years ago, my husband started researching and making Anglican rosaries. He thought the tradition behind them and the prayer ritual they guided to be beautiful, and so he made a rosary for me and one for each of his children, and for his nieces, and our two goddaughters, and his mom and my mom. For each one he carefully chose the beads according to his sense of the soul he was making the rosary for. He let the beads speak to him. That green one is mine. He said the pearlescent green made him think of my eyes, and I love the larger beads, which look like miniature worlds, and the cross with the heart at the center of it.

My husband is very much a church man; it feeds his spirit, I suppose like writing feeds mine. The ministry is his path not taken. He's the warden at our church, and people there got wind of his rosaries and began requesting them. Today is the so called Annual Ginormous Flea Market to benefit the church and community, and last night, he sat at the counter meditatively stringing rosaries to sell at the flea market. Each of the seven beads in each grouping represents a prayer, and the four larger beads are to form the points of the cross and there are 33 beads in all, for the number of years Christ walked the earth, and there's much more symbolism that I don't quite know because I haven't researched it the way my love has. If you're interested, you can find more here. I only know that I enjoy seeing my husband sitting there, his drug store-bought reading glasses perched on his nose, his big capable hands delicately stringing those beads, choosing the combinations, snipping and burning the wayward threads, making each one perfect, no two the same. He looks so peaceful when he's working; he exudes an aura that all is well in his world. I drink that in like parched earth drinks water. It centers him, which centers me.