Incense and Peppermints

 There can be the most unlikely and strikingly beautiful friendships formed, if we just step out of our paradigms of what should be.  This is the story of a very small girl, and a very sick woman, and how they healed one another's souls with pure love.   

When Carrie was two, her Auntie came home. She climbed up onto the green scratchy davenport (seriously, who bought those things?), and leaned into this stranger's arm.  The stranger (who had been monikered Auntie), looked down, and said "Hello, baby".  Or at least this is how the story has always gone.  But it doesn't even begin to encompass what happened in the ensuing six years.  This is such a  difficult story to write, you know, because it's mine- I'm the she, the her, the Carrie- and she, the Auntie, isn't hear to tell her part, which means I shall take liberties, and perhaps surmise what she was thinking or feeling or being driven by in some moments, but truly, I can't imagine it was anything BUT the most pure love.  I thought perhaps the story would roll out more easily if I tried to tell it in the third person, but as it turns, I cannot. This is my heart.  My soul.  My wholeness, my brokenness, my amazing experience and immeasurable grief.  This is what it's like to be Mole, and Wilbur, and the Snow Goose, and the recipient of the Jennifer Gift.  It's being a Borrower, stepping into Stuart Little's shoes, finding magic in all things- imagining oneself one of Cicely Mary Barker's incomparable flower faeries.  It's knowing Mother West Wind's Hows and Whys, it's the safety of an imaginary meadow, the cool damp earth on one's feet felt by another.  It's communication that transcends words and space and time, and happens in the ethereal spaces- precious and fleeting, almost imperceptible, save for the feeling of utter content, security, and yes, once again, pure love that remain, like a whisper on the wind.  It's noticing so many tiny details, having someone who knows every crevice, ever fold of your grey matter, and treats it with the gentlest hands clad in only the best silk gloves.  It's Goldfish crackers, and Perrier in slush mugs, and tuna salad with cottage cheese and pineapple on a buttered English muffin, toasted just so. It's the Queen's English, always.  It's that we must have lived in a cottage on the edge of a village in the Cotswolds at the foot of Bredon Hill, once.  It's that we've heard those church bells that we've yet to see.  It's the sound of the oxygen tank, and the song of Chip and Dale, and every episode of Nova, and Art on the Move, and Stationary Ark, and the coolness of her sheets on any summer's evening.  It's my own personal Narnia- that magical place on the other side of the door that leaves everything else behind.  It's Scotch sticky notes on my door almost every morning when I awoke.  Encouragement, wit, Items of Great Interest, and by the way, what do you get when you pour boiling water down a rabbit hole?  Hot, cross bunnies.  It seems as though I may need to take some time to sort the stories into digestible bits for the masses.  It will come....