Today Annabelle made a “rat trap.” She took a ball of yarn from my knitting baskets and wrapped various things around her room until she had made what looked like a giant spider web. She had a whole plan for the hole the rat needed to go into and she enlisted Henry to hang onto one end of the sparkly orange yarn and told him to pull on the yarn as soon as he saw a rat. He nodded and took his job very seriously. A while later, the house became unusually silent. I walked into the living room to find Henry standing on a chair while Annabelle wound him up with more yarn. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was wrapping Henry up so he couldn’t get off the chair. Luckily, she hasn’t mastered her knots, so Henry was able to hop down as soon as he wanted. I’m fascinated by her innovation with all my gorgeous yarn, although I don’t know how I’ll ever untangle it.
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Backpacking Adventures: Lost in Italy, Found in a Field of Sunflowers
Lost in Italy, Found in a field of sunflowers
Love and Loss and the Magic of Fairy Wings
And now the baby is 16, the same age as Sleeping Beauty when she pricked her finger on that spinning wheel and fell asleep. But my girl is definitely not asleep. She’s awake, probably the most awake person I know. At 16 years old, the is full of love and kindness and a devotion to truth and justice that seems unshakeable. This girl can easily defeat fire-breathing dragons. So maybe all the wishes from the women/fairies at her baby shower worked that day.
The truth of the truths, the truth of my battered grieving soul, is that love just keeps growing. I loved my father so much and then I met Kim, and my heart burst into lights and a whole new love, a love I had never seen before and it felt like my heart got bigger, and then I became a mother, and my love grew even bigger. Boundless. Timeless. Eternal. I still feel it when I look at the sunlight on the sea, when I link arms with my son, when I hear my daughter yelling, “Mom! I need an emergency hug right away!”
And, now that I know the staggering pain that comes with losing the people you love so much, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a damn thing. I wouldn’t trade one extraordinary moment.
When we made the wings all those years ago, Kim kept saying we were infusing them with our love. I think she was right. Because if there’s one real truth in this world, no matter where people go when they die, the love remains, and in the swamp of grief, I need to remember the wings.
“You Must Move Through the World in a Way that Enchants You!”
“You must move through the world in a way that enchants you!”
