Poetry Dog Tags

 

A long time ago my mom gave me a novelty gift of a tin box full of stamped metal tags called Poetry Dog Tags. Each tag had one word on it, and the tags were meant to be added to a chain to make an inspirational necklace. I remembered making it once for Sharon with the words, "I good boy, me bite mama." Your basic caveman style valentine.

The box, with the tags, has been sitting in my closet untouched for a decade. Today the cats knocked over a huge box of items in the closet creating a giant mess, which left me cursing. However, in cleaning up the mess, I came across the box of dog tags, which had managed to stay closed during the fall. That is, until I picked it up the wrong way and spilled out all the contents on the floor.

The chain had been strung with a message slightly longer than the one I remembered, so I looked at it to figure out where the words started and where they finished. I decoded it, and it was a message from Sharon, from before we were married:

"My perfect happy place is under a huge plant at the ocean with the man I love together when time sparkle in sweet skies."

I cried a little remembering the time she created that sentence as best she could using the words available. She really wanted to say "tree" instead of huge plant, and sparkles instead of sparkle, but she had to work with the tags that were in the box. I remember us both laughing at her ingenuity in substituting "huge plant" for tree. Now I'm pondering the idea of time sparkling in sweet skies and thinking that it was her description of heaven.

And that, of course,  has me bawling all over again.