Pealing bells link a daughter’s heart to her mother’s past

A promised charm tells a hidden story as it finds its way to Anita’s wrist

By ANITA ALLSOPP
Special to the WCR

My mother Françoise greatly loved her gold charm bracelet.

Throughout her married life she collected gold charms to mark important events in her life and that of the family. This bracelet became an icon filled with symbols.

The first gold charm, a tiny gold bell engraved with my name, was from Belgium and commemorated my birth in 1948. Often during my growing-up years my mother would talk of the different charms on her bracelet, always coming back to the tiny gold bell that she wanted me to have when she died.

I realized, over time. that the bell held great significance to her, something deeper than my birth. I grew up and left home and forgot about the bracelet and the gift promised me.

Fran‡oise died in 1973 when I was 25 years old. I remembered the promised gold bell. But to no avail. My father kept the bracelet and all its charms.

Lost again

In 1996, on the death of my father, the bracelet passed into the hands of his second wife. I was 48 years old and it had been 23 years since my mother's death.

I had given up hope of ever receiving the cherished gift that was meant for me. My mother's wish had been buried in the sands of time. The bracelet was in the hands of another woman for whom gold was precious.

Hopeless and in despair, I was walking home on the dark crucifixion day of Good Friday, months after my father's death when a child ran across my path from her front door to the car waiting at the curb.

This child, obviously on her way to an Easter concert, was wearing a dress sequined with tiny gold bells.

Eternal mother's love

I stop dead in my tracks, stunned. I take this to be a sign that maybe I really didn't need that tiny gold charm to remind me of my mother's love. Her love surpasses the desires trapped and buried in time.

In the mail delivery a few days later shortly after Easter, I received from my father's estate the tiny gold bell from my mother's beloved bracelet. Overwhelmed, my tears flow.

A week later, as I shared these serendipitous events with a good friend, we paused in silence to ponder this wonderful story.

The music playing in the background comes to the fore, and we listen to Linnea Good, one of my friend's favourite singers, singing Julian of Norwich.

Loud are the bells of Norwich, and the people come and go Here by the tower of Julian, I tell them what I know Ring out bells of Norwich, and let the winter come and go All shall be well again, I know.

The sound of bells behind the words fills the silent space. In a heartbeat, my consciousness was struck by three consecutive signs - a child in a dress sequined with bells, a gold bell in the mail, and a song of the bells of Norwich.

Perhaps, for the first time, I intuit a gracious and loving universe with tangible evidence that desires and longings seemingly lost have their day of reckoning. I know. I hold in my hands an icon of a mother's love, a tiny gold charm, a bell that I thought forever lost.

I also solved the riddle of the deeper meaning of the bell. At the end of the Second World War, bells in every church in Europe rang out the good news - the war was over. Peace would return to the people of a war-torn land. My mother had danced for joy at the sound of these bells celebrating the end of her exile and that of her country.

Now, like my mother did, I carry in my heart the joy of the end of an exile. A mother's eternal love has broken through the barrier of time that seemingly conspired to keep it hidden. I dance with my mother to the sound of tolling bells.

What is promised does come true. The Promised Land does exist, with exile always the beginning of the journey.

And I know that some treasures buried in the sands of time are forever. Love never grows old or frail and never dies.

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