Drunk with the Fragrant Evening…

Saturday April 2nd, 2011

Dearest Sister of my Heart,

Tonight, amidst the craziness of “bedtime” in my house, I caught a whiff of the fragrant evening whispering in through my window.  So I stopped.  I stopped and just listened to an evening of fresh-cut grass and gardenia.  I stopped and enjoyed, my nose pressed up against the bathroom window screen as the wash-bin tub sloshed at my side ready to be played in by a super-hero wannabe four year old.  I stopped and I breathed it in and within that moment I was gliding across a glassy lake, paddle in hand, metallic sloshing against the side of the canoe from the eddies made by my strokes.  The wind was in my face, my arms a little too sunkissed, itchy mosquito-bitten legs propped in front of me, and we were laughing across the water, a song upon our lips.  So I stood in my bathroom without moving and breathed, not thinking, just stopped…

…

…

…AND then the world came crashing back to urgency and duty with a call from down the stairs, “MOOOOOM, I want more food!”  Hmm.

For a moment, however, I was “me” again… just breathing in an evening of birds and breeze.  I was the contemplator (never been much of a thinker, but a contemplator, yes), the one who knows how to incorporate the smell of the night into who I am.  I was the girl we knew on canoe trips dragging my hands through the underwater long green grass of the river and looking for the loneliest rock at the campsite to sit alone and just be.  I was “Caranaut” the explorer.  (What was that even in reference to?)  It was beautiful.  Sometimes I sit at home in my tropical garden and wonder what happened to the northwoodsian in me… and then a fragrant night steals through my bathroom window to remind me that I’m still there, it’s just that life only fills up the further you go into it.  It’s a good thing, I think… The more life that you live, the more there is to be had!  So at the moment, I am a northwoodsian contemplative turned tropical mommy… and the cool part is, if I can just “be” (like on that lonely rock at the campsite) and embrace who I am in within each of these places, then they become part of “me” as well.  I hope by the time I die I am a composite of all of the beautiful places, people, and experiences (good and bad) that God wound my path through because I was able to just “be” fully present with Him as I traversed them.  What a beautiful image that is… an image that smells of a fragrant evening.

Miss you Saranaut,

The Tropical Northwoodsian

P.S. – Wow… many moons ago!  …I miss you!