A Fresh Season of Life

                                                "Lucid"   from the Dreamborn series by Kyraith Several years ago (oh so many!) my daughter Amie taught me a lesson...And it's one that I keep repeating to myself now and then, just because I need constant reminding. We were waiting on the bus.  Amie was 16 or 17 at the time.  "What would you do if..."  I think this particular morning the subject was "you were to win the lottery."  Amie was lavish in her dreams.  She treated herself and family to many needs and a great deal many more wants.  She traveled and ventured and did oh so many things.  Then it was my turn.

I was doing some rather mundane household chore the other day when I suddenly thought, "I'd kind of like a fairy Godmother..."  Mama bought a set of books for us children when we were far too young to read.  She ordered some classics and among the set was a book of fairytales.  Grimms Fairytales as it happens and let me assure you that the authors' name was a fit description for the tales told therein.

  Things were going so well.  I've been riding on the wave of my newfound confidence and joy.  I've made a good start on losing weight.  I am adding good things back into my life.  I have been filled with a sense of abundance instead of the fear and worry I tend to lean on when it comes to finances.  I felt I was writing better.  I was enjoying my (admittedly feeble) artistic attempts. And then it started.    

  Tuesday:   John is gone today.  As in all day  today and it would truly be a shame to do no writing at all.  I spent the morning out shopping, the fun sort, where I wandered Hobby Lobby and Goodwill and TJ Maxx...but now that I'm home, and I still have a whole afternoon alone...Writing and putting my feet up is what appeals most. The following will likely be written as a random post, but the sections are somewhat connected.

Granny had a grey vellum bound, thin volume of "101 Best Loved Poems" printed in the early 1930's.  I found it on her bookshelves Granny was my original 'lending library'.  She had volumes and volumes of books and allowed us grandchildren to borrow them to take home.   I borrowed that book of poems over and over again.  I read Walt Whitman and John Greenleaf Whittier and Robert Lowell, Edgar Allen Poe, Edgar A. Guest...I loved reading those poems and often kept the book for a month or more, copying out my favorites to read through again and again. When I was 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who was a true mentor and birthed in me the first real inspiration I'd ever had.  Lynn Smith Campbell taught the junior high English classes.  One quarter of that years must have been writing and composition.  It was this class that sparked my inner writer.

Over the past three months, I've had this unshakeable sense of abundance in my life.  Let me make a few things clear very quickly here.  I am not going to discuss money in the same way that I have in the past.  I am not going to tell you how to stretch a dollar or make a meal go further or how to cut back.  I am not about to share a bevy of affirmations.  Nor am I about to delve into vision boards and feng shui.   I'm talking about an internal shift .

  Many years ago, I had a dear friend who changed her furniture around at least five times a year.  She lived in a modest home and at some point, every room except the bathroom and her beauty shop were switched around routinely.  Her living room was in every single room of the house.  A hallway might become a dining room, a bedroom might become a living room, her living room might turn into a dining room.  She might have an eat-in kitchen or a dining space on the back porch.  Walls got painted whatever color struck her fancy and matched her furniture at the time.  She lived in her house, and she lived well.

I've been using the phrase 'authentic' a lot lately, if not in the written words I put out, then in my own head, or in my journal pages.  This morning, I went to look up authentic, because while I thought I knew what it meant, maybe I needed a refresher in how it's defined. Authentic :  not false or copied or an imitation; genuine; real.  Worthy of acceptance. True to oneself. That adds dimension to what I thought it meant...

I've been thinking a lot about 8-year-old me...Wondering why I'd been silent all these years towards her.  It took some real deep digging to find out exactly what was going on between myself and her. Years ago, in a similar season of excavation and discovery, I had a dream of an adult Terri rescuing a child who had been hidden away in a dark cupboard.  I scolded the older girl child who was responsible for treating her so and told her she was never to treat the younger child in such a way again.  I was quite angry and quite forceful in my language to the older girl.   When I awoke from that dream, it didn't take a lot of psychoanalysis on my part to figure out that both the girls were a part of myself and that the older had behaved pretty badly towards the younger.

John and I laughingly share a fantasy of what our next move will look like.  We began this little fantasy when we moved into this house thirty years ago. We didn't have funds left to rent a truck and all the friends we had were suddenly perpetually busy when we were ready to move.  So, we came up with a routine.  Every night I'd load up my SUV as full as I could get it with boxes and things.  Then I'd drive the 50 miles to work.  When work was done, I'd drive the hour here and unload the boxes, drive the 30 miles home and after supper I'd load the SUV all over again, then pack more boxes.   After three weeks we were down to all but the sofas and bookcases, washer and dryer.  And I was DONE. It was a long and tedious process, and I was exhausted by the end of it.  That's when we started our fantasy about our next move.