A week ago, on Saturday, we had 50-degree weather and lots of sun. It felt so good. As much as I love gardens and flowers, I am not a gardener, nor do I really love to garden. But my yard wasn’t looking as neat as I wanted it too, so with 50-degree weather and a nice breeze I decided that now that it is March (add a chuckle here:), I might as well finish winterizing my yard? Anyway, I trimmed my gangly roses and the remaining dead peppermint stalks. I trimmed back my two white sage bushes so that my husband could mow around them without being attacked and cleaned up my lavender and even a few old peony plants. It felt so relaxing and peaceful with gentle, softer, smells than in the summer, reminders of summer peppermint, sage and lavender drifting on the breeze. Life is filled with so many gifts and wonders that we often miss if we don’t take a moment from time to time to enjoy them.
My sage, my roses and a beautiful little bird nest from last year🧚🏻♂️
Ice on our windows and a complete blizzard whiteout❄️
Today is just the opposite. We have a real, old-fashioned blizzard blowing all around us. Everything shut down including schools and even many of the main stores. The snow is blowing sideways, and ice is collecting on our windows and houses and cars. It is gorgeous and dangerous. Both of these recent days reminded me of the time I spent in the room full of mirrors and bright light. I had left the damp rugged dirt and roots hall and followed Grandma Mae into a painfully bright room. Squinting, the room became clearer. It was a circular room lined with mirrors with gigantic chandeliers hanging from the ceilings. And the ceilings! They were gorgeous. They were lined with mirrors as well, but they were different. There were white rocks and crystals and pearls and trinkets, and all sorts of treasures embedded in the mirrors. There were some dried roses and figurines of little woodland creatures and, of course, faeries. And there was a faint smell of flowers from summers past.
Before I go on, I need to describe in more detail, a part of me that isn’t always welcome but is something I secretly love. As I have said before, I have a giggle. It is a super power really. This giggle that shows up unexpectedly, like when someone hurts themselves in a funny way, or when I’m a little too tired, or when one of my children or grandchildren does something cute and funny but maybe not super smart or perfectly good;
Above and below are our precocious, smart, whitty, and often very funny children! You can plainly see why they would illicit my giggle😂
like when my oldest daughter taught her next youngest sister how to eat applesauce by blowing over the top of the spoon filled with applesauce and spraying it all over the kitchen, or when my second oldest daughter and our youngest son say something so intelligent and filled innocently with ancient wisdom that I have to giggle, or when my third oldest daughter was young and she would say something like how she didn’t have to listen to me because Shaya, her invisible mother who was standing beside her, told her she could or when my next youngest child, a boy who was only a couple years old comes running in the house to hide behind me saying, “I think I upset the faeries!” I giggled because his sisters were playing with their faerie houses and he must have done something to get their attention, but how can you punish a little guy when all he wanted to do was play with the faeries too? My giggle is especially strong when I am in a room full of people and everyone is supposed to be quiet, or when I am putting our youngest daughter to sleep and giggling with her is more fun or when our second oldest boy uses his natural sense of humor to say just the right thing to his father during a more serious moment and I giggle when I definitely shouldn’t! I believe it is actually a faerie trait that is connected to pure happiness in the depths of my soul, possibly with a little mischief mixed in. Anyway, the moment I stepped into this room of mirrors, my giggle bubbled up from deep inside me. It then began to grow until I looked at myself in the mirror.
The giggle faded as I assessed what I saw. I looked very tired and drawn. I had lost a lot of weight so my figure was more what my frame was used to, but I felt saggy. During my previous years, my body was so
beaten down with an overabundance of stress that my adrenals flatlined and without cortisol and properly functioning adrenals, I gained weight that my body could no longer regulate. I had lost much of my hair along with my beautiful skin and teeth. Over the past few years, I got healthier, I had lost much of the excess weight, my hair grew in thicker but until it was thick enough to grown long, it was still super short. My teeth were no longer black and falling out and they had been fixed by an artistic dentist who did an amazing job. My skin was almost as clear as it had been in my youth, though there were more lines of worry and stress still haunting me. And though, I looked much better than I had, I was still more warn and looked terribly tired.
As I looked in to the mirror to my right, I saw an image of myself as a child, full of life and laughter, running through the forests with my faeries. Seeing this made me giggle out loud and was probably the reason my giggle bubbled up in the first place. I loved seeing myself as that child and desired to run through the glass to find that old forest and that younger me, but a part of me felt cold. I wanted what I saw there but was suddenly afraid of what I’d have to face or give up to get it. So, I quickly turned to look behind me.
As I looked behind me, I saw an image of myself as a young girl who had been exposed to the world outside my family, she was still a child with freedom and laughter and happiness but was much more cautious, more of a perfectionist as a form of control. She did well in her studies and was active in many different groups, sports teams, and choirs but seemed to have lost something. The image of my younger self shifted into myself as a teenager shortly after my sister died when I had fully left my faerie friends and I could no longer laugh or cry. This mirror frightened me more than the first and I continued turning to my right.
In that mirror was an image of me as a young wife, trying to wrestle with the challenges of a difficult and abusive marriage, raising four gregarious and intelligent children, serving in my community and church, while keeping a misleading smile on my face. I was surprised to find that I felt very alone even though I was married and had a family and some close friends. I didn’t want to know why. I turned back, almost to the front of the room.
Left of my current image was a mirror that I didn’t fully recognize, at least not from my past. It was me, to be sure, but I was older and healthier and happier and more beautiful with age. My hair was long, just past my shoulders and blond and full again. My skin, with the blessing of eternal youth that my mother had passed down to me, was glowing and firm. I looked truly happy. This felt comforting at first, but I could feel a chill race up my spine as I continued to observe the older me. How could I ever get there? Grandma Mae just stood silently in the background and let me feel.
