Begin Again

She was the type who could do almost anything.
Everything she baked was delicious, she could sew intricately, and her garden buzzed with life that she had brought to it.

I remember watching my mom’s best friend, Lyn, as a kid, thinking that I hoped one day I’d grow up and be just like that, with a house that felt like a treasure box of interesting things to look at.
Music would play, firewood would crackle, and animals ran.

She was the one you’d turn to for nearly any request.
When I got married she handmade the flower girl’s dress, and presented it to me wrapped in a way that I’ll never forget.
It was like she was a bee, pollinating every flower she landed on,
spreading life everywhere she went, until one day she finally went to the doctor for that pain in her back and found out it was aggressive cancer that had spread from her breast.

Quickly the cancer leeched life from her, taking thing by thing from her like the thief that it is.
I was a stay at home mom by the time she was reaching the end, and I carted my baby, Chloe, and went weekly to clean her house for her when her crooked, welcoming smile was almost all she had left.

When Christmas time came, she placed in my hand a tissue paper package that she told me to open gently.
When I did, what was inside was her type of craft:
Something brilliant she’d thought of on her own.
Something unexpected –
Six dried Queen Anne’s Lace flowers the winter had turned into sticks, that she had spray painted white and sprinkled with iridescent glitter.

When she saw me questioning what it was I held, she explained,
“If you stick them in a Christmas tree they’ll look like you have big, beautiful snowflakes on it.”

A harsh winter tree with something delicate, and surprising…
She was one of life’s beautiful snowflakes.

I will never forget.

Lyn passed that year as my mom and I held her hand.
Every Christmas time afterwards, I have removed that same tissue wrapped package of homemade snowflakes carefully from where I store them,
but even as careful with them as I have always been,
every year some have broken, or chipped, until what I have been left with are two remaining, symbolic survivors that have been battered a bit.
Maybe from now on I’ll call those two “Kerri and Lyn.”

My family has gotten used to the way I have instructed them to be careful with the snowflakes as we decorate the tree.
They’re a treasure.

They remind me of something.

The last several years have been intensely lonely and challenging.
The teenagers have tested me, marriage is hard, money has been tight, I have had to fight for my own health.
To be honest, I haven’t yet really enjoyed these mid-life years.
There’s been far too little dancing, baking, music, and laughter, and far too many tears.
No one really talks about the way, in them, that it all creeps in,
and before you know it you’re looking back on your life wondering where the YOU in it all is.

The other day, feeling low, I asked the girls if they would want to go out on a walk with me along the trails behind the local park.
I needed fresh air, and to feel the sun soak into my skin.

At first it was more like dragging them, as it always is, but before long we were ducking tree branches and hopping mud puddles along a back trail, smiling at the world around us that the month of rain had made fresh.

As usual, the girls ran up ahead, leaving me to wander, contemplating again my feelings of alone-ness, even when I’m with my kids;
Proud of myself for trying,
congratulating myself for at least getting out of the house for a bit.

Then suddenly I saw Chloe re-emerging from up ahead.
She had what looked like a brown bouquet clutched in her hand.

“Hey, aren’t these the things you need to make more of those snowflakes you love?”

I looked down to notice that what she held was a bouquet of perfect Queen Anne’s Lace.

I heard it whisper,
“Begin again.”

I hadn’t even noticed while walking that we were surrounded by it –
Everywhere I looked – like a sea I could have laid back and floated in.

I smiled and thanked her, welling with tears, and taking the bouquet from her,
passed to me like The Torch of Life.

She ran off, and I just stared at it.
That dried up bouquet reminded me of something right then:
To be the woman I always wanted to be,
full of life and music; A color explosion.

It reminds me of not just who I want to be, but who I already AM.
It reminds me of all that lies beyond what is seen with the eyes, and that sometimes, you’ll realize you’re surrounded by hope if you simply lift them a bit.

Those old dried up sticks didn’t look like much of a bouquet that day.
I’m sure anyone that saw me carrying them probably wondered why I’d pick something that looked so dead,
but I knew to look beyond, to see what it could be:
Glistening, fresh-fallen snowflakes on a Christmas tree.

More Than What Meets the Eye: A lesson by Lyn.

I hope that in the years that follow that bouquet will be used to remind me that not all that looks dried up on the outside is for nothing.
There are new uses for everything, even in what looks like a death.
I was in need of hope, and possibility, not even realizing I was surrounded by it,
and as I walked on holding that bouquet, it was like I could hear her also whispering to me,
“New life comes next.”

A Queen Anne’s Lace bouquet told me to never forget;
Not all I’m capable of, or who I am.
I was taught some of life’s most powerful lessons on living by a dying woman with a crooked smile without one hair on her brilliant head.

The middle isn’t the end, she showed me.

We just begin again.

Mom Outnumbered

Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.