Look at my mane! Look at my teeth!
I‘m a most magnificent beast!
Only, Little Artist, could you at least
Name me and draw me a body beneath?
“Lion’s Mane” by Scout, age 6.
To me the lion seems quite happy to have been drawn thus far.
Although its expression might be a little sketchy...
Who wouldn’t love a seahorse pen?
Hippocampus reigns in hand and brains!
Iridescent eyes awaiting
My planner for updating
See the daily reminder here…
You are made of magic.
This really is my seahorse pen and planner. Just sayin’.
Dedicated to my blogger-friends at SOS—Sharing Our Stories: Magic in a Blog
in light of the challenge to capture a bit of whimsy
One morning, as I brush my teeth, out from behind the mirror comes a little spider.
It sits there on the wall as if watching me.
I am not a spider fan, generally. But I don’t kill these little wanderers (sudden inspired quote: Not all those who wander are lost. Hmmm. Interesting point, Tolkien).
No, usually I capture the creatures and put them outside. If they’re small. I am getting someone else to deal with them if they’re large.
This spider is tiny.
And . . . I don’t know . . . friendly. I know exactly what my husband would say: What, you think it’s Charlotte, right?
I just don’t have the heart to bother it. It’s not bothering me, so I let it be. Right there on the wall by the mirror. I finish getting ready for work, turn the bathroom light off, and call, “Bye, Spider. Have a good day.”
I think no more of it until the next morning when I am brushing my teeth, and out from behind the mirror comes my new friend.
We begin meeting this way every morning.
“There you are!” I say as my spider emerges later than normal one day. “Sleeping in? Have a late night?”
I swear if I can find a cup tiny enough, my spider would have coffee with me. I imagine it holding a miniscule newspaper. What our conversations would be:
What are you going to do today?
Oh, just stalk some prey. The usual.
Great. Get the gnats, will you? They’re on my last nerve. I don’t know where those things come from.
Sure thing.
Then comes the day the spider doesn’t show.
And the next.
And the one after that.
I begin to be sad. Seriously. Surely no one in my family has . . . no. I won’t think like that. I haven’t told any of them about my daily morning rendezvous. They can’t know, then, that I have a relationship with this spider, so. . . .
But no one has mentioned seeing a spider, so I don’t, either.
After another week, as I am dressing in the morning—lo and behold!—what should I see but my tiny friend there on the floor by the garden tub!
“Where have you BEEN?” I cry.
“What?” calls my husband from down the hall.
“Uh . . . never mind!” I call back.
I grab my phone and take a picture, because, well, that’s what you do with friends. You take pictures to remember them by.
I bend close. My spider comes nearer to me.
“Listen,” I say. “I missed you. I’m happy to see you’re well and all, but when I’m not here you really need to stay out of sight, okay? Other people just won’t understand.”
My spider takes this in. I can tell. I’ve looked him up and I know he’s a jumping spider and that they are very intelligent. They have cognitive abilities. They can be trained . . . after all, doesn’t he know where to find me each morning?
In other parts of the house, I hear my family bustling about, getting ready for school, for work.
“It’s not safe at the moment,” I tell my spider. “When everyone’s gone, you can come back out and do whatever it is you do during the day, but for now. . . .”
I slide a bit of paper towel under my spider.
He hangs on. Doesn’t protest.
I tuck him gently behind my fuzzy gray bedroom shoes.
“There,” I whisper. “That’ll do. Until later.”
I turn out the light.
“Bye, Spider. See you in the morning.”
I feel certain, from his sanctuary behind my bedroom shoe, that he’s waving a tiny leg.
The island dawn is one of nebulous grayness, the sun an oblique white disc shrouded in veils of clouds. Painted from a palette of pearl, silver, and slate, the sand, the sea, the sky are starkly monochromatic, like an old black-and-white-movie. The temperature is indeterminate, neither hot nor cold. The morning is not uninviting nor inviting; it simply is.
As I make my way past softly rolling dunes of long grass shivering and undulating in the wind, I think only of the ocean, the opportunity to savor its splendor in relative isolation, away from commercialism. I expect to see a die-hard beachcomber or two; surely this a shell-collector’s paradise.
I do not expect the tree.
There it is, up ahead in the sand, directly in front of the path where dunes give way to the shore, with the shimmering, empty Atlantic for a backdrop.
How curious. I’ve not seen a tree smack in the middle of a beach before.
Are there others? I scan the shoreline, as far as I can see, on the left and the right.
No.
This is the only tree.
Did it grow here, somehow? I investigate. I suspect not, as the sand is built up around the tree’s base, although I can’t discern human handprints. Or footprints. I don’t even know what kind of tree this is, although I saw numerous others like it lying in the Pamlico Sound on the Hatteras side of the ferry ride to Ocracoke. I should have asked the crew what kind of trees these are and why they lie so far out in the water.
Driftwood, then.
It stands here on the vacant beach with its thin, snaky branches twisting skyward. Shells dangle from some of the vine-like tips, reminiscent of castanets on fingers. Or earrings.
I am enchanted. I’ve a sense of standing in no-man’s land, except that someone has clearly been here. Maybe someones, plural. Mystery people were inspired to plant this bit of driftwood and to decorate it with what was near at hand.
The tree is dead. Shells, for all their intricate beauty, are but skeletons. I marvel at the human heart, its great desire for creativity and play. At the ability of the inner artist to see that random pieces of things no longer living, broken things, can come together in such an unexpected way. Whimsy in the wind. The beach tree stands as a mystical reminder that all is not lost, that all has value, that there’s beauty beyond the brokenness if we are willing to rearrange the pieces. The extraordinary lies not beyond the ordinary, but within it. Not beyond us, but within us, within our very grasp, if we just reach.
The ocean sparkles despite the obscured sun, like the twinkling of an eye when someone’s just about to smile.
Note: The title is a deliberate play on that of a previous post about my son’s trip to Iceland – both attempts at capturing the essence of place: Mythical morn.
lit bits and pieces 