Footprints

I am sometimes ashamed at how infrequently I post here.  It doesn't mean I don't think about my Cora.  She is never far from my thoughts and heart.  And even recently I have had some fairly hard days.  I just don't think about posting.

Anyway, about a year ago I wanted do do a hand print art with my kids, but wanted to include Cora, so I decided I was going to trace her foot print.  When I pulled she sheet with the two prints on it from the memory box of cards and such I was devastated that they were so faded you could barely see them.  It broke my heart, and has bothered me since.

Fast forward to a couple nights ago.  I opened a box of trinkets and things that I packed up when we moved right after Erin was born, and haven't opened since.  Owen, being his 2-year-old self has been pulling boxes out from where they're stacked under a counter and standing or sitting on them, so I wanted to check to see if anything was broken.  And inside I found a 4x6 picture in a frame.  This picture is of a feather that was laying on the gravel beside Jenny Lake the night before Matt and I (and a sister of mine and a sister of his) spread her ashes there.  A single solitary feather with nothing around it.  When I saw it, I felt profoundly that it was a sign that Cora was there with us.  When I scrapbooked spreading her ashes, I wanted to include that picture, and left a space for it, even though I couldn't find that particular frame.  So for nearly 9 years, there has just been a space waiting for it.

Needless to say, I forgot *which* book that page was in.  And so I pulled out Cora's scrapbook (it wasn't in hers, it was in the one I have for me and Matt), and a just a few pages in, there were her foot prints.  Her REAL foot prints.  I had forgotten that they had taken several sets and that I had put the best in her book and the rest in the box that I had found the others with.  And they weren't faded at all.

I cried.  Big wracking sobs.  Erin was in the room and very concernedly asked if I was okay, but I really couldn't describe just why I was reacting like I was.  Brokenhearted joy is really the best way I can think of.

So I scanned that page, so I can have digital copies.  And then I printed one, traced it, and made stamps out of it for an art project.