the heart hunt
It all started with a heart potato.
My husband and I had been dating a little more than a year at this point, and my future mother-in-law was in town helping us cut vegetables in our third-story apartment kitchen on Thanksgiving. Early afternoon November light streamed through windows that provided a clear view of the Sandia mountains. Sun rays filtered in on orange tulips placed in the center of our wooden folding table, and they were bent over - no doubt because Stella cat had been batting at them while we were out the day before.
Travis sliced a mountain of mushrooms and he would be near the stove for the better part of the day. He’d discovered the most delicious vegetarian gravy recipe on the internet the year before, and it would become one of his most important Thanksgiving assignments forever after, no matter how many hours it took each year.
It was 2012, and that year, one of my food assignments was yams. I was preparing them with a not-so-secret family recipe that surely came off a marshmallow package at some point. I cubed them, dropping them handfuls at a time in a clear baking dish, and smothered them sliced butter, brown sugar, and delightful mini marshmallows - the kind you can’t resist but snack on while chopping and talking.
My mother-in-law was peeling russet potatoes. She’d just taken a swipe off the side of one of them then paused, held it up, and said, “This looks like a heart! We should take a picture and send it to Nikki. She loves everything with hearts.”
This was new, fun information for me as someone who was just getting to know my future family. A phone photo was snapped and sent to my future sister-in-law, and within minutes, a tradition looking for hearts was formed.
It wasn’t too long after that Thanksgiving that Nikki sent Travis and I a small wooden dish in the mail. She said it was a place to save heart rocks, and that she and Travis’ brother had done the same thing until they had too many to fit in one small place. She lined her porch with them and discovered them everywhere.
I looked for hearts in nature every time we went hiking in New Mexico and placed a few rocks in the plate. I occasionally snapped photos of cloud shadows on the mountains and prickly pear cactuses found in the foothills near our home and on nearly every trail. During our honeymoon in Portugal in 2013, Travis and I found a heart in some broken cobblestone and I couldn’t resist the heart-shaped cookies sold in a bakery we passed every day. The cookies weren’t natural hearts, but they were cute and delicious, and that was more than enough to pass for a photo.
Later, Travis took photos of a smoke heart drawn in a bright blue sky by a pilot during an air show. We captured hearts in Montana and Arizona that still remain some of my favorites. And in the summer 2014, when my parents came to visit us in New Mexico, we walked along the White Rim Trail in Los Alamos and I told everyone to look for hearts. My dad took this more seriously than expected, and he was the only one that found one that day. We snapped a photo of him holding it in front of his chest, a smile on his face, blue mountains in the background.
That December, on what we all thought was a normal Tuesday, my dad passed away unexpectedly and my heart shattered into 1,000 pieces. Life felt really hard for a long time after that. Nothing prepared me for the way tragedy can strike out of nowhere and it flipped my soul upside down. I carried grief with me everywhere, like rocks in a backpack, and I tumbled over and over as if I were underwater, being tossed by ocean waves that make your senses lose where the sky is.
In the very center of that tragedy, though, was hope, and it came in the shape of hearts that I could suddenly see everywhere. It was like my dad remembered and created a game for my family and friends that we could play wherever we were. I received photos of hearts in the shape of spilled yogurt, strawberries, stone sidewalks, leaves, pickles, potato chips, and flower fields. Soon I had hundreds of photos from people finding them all over the world, and I created an Instagram feed to save and share them.
In the beginning, following that heart potato, I thought natural hearts were scarce surprises, but like love itself, hearts are everywhere we choose to look.
I’m starting this space because I need somewhere outside of social media to continue sharing hearts and stories. I plan to keep and continue the Instagram feed, but I want a space for longer form writing, stories and poetry. This will be another community space, including guest writers and heart hunters. I hope you’ll join in and follow along.
