The Glass Powder Box

The glass powder box currently contains French clay used to make a mask for the face. This container is three inches in diameter with a somewhat opaque top, like frosted glass. The texture is coarser than smooth translucent glass. There is a ½ inch scallop curling around the edge of the top, opaque on top and smooth and translucent on the bottom. The box itself is made up of rises and valleys with the rises being smooth and translucent. Looking carefully at the rises, one sees a chain of swans appearing to be swimming in the opaque glass water. The swans are clear glass and smooth to the touch. At first glance, the swans look like partial question marks, no period at the bottom. The glass tastes bitter from the soap remnants on my hands when I pick up the top. It is cool to the touch and without fragrance.

The clay inside this box is a pale green which gives the box a slight tint of gray green. The clay smells like earth and dried clay. It is silky to the touch and tastes bland.

On the bottom of the box, two small cork pads remain. One is missing. The cork provides protection against scratching surfaces on which the box sits. It is the kind of box that conjures up sterling silver dresser sets, crystal perfume bottles and mahogany furniture.

The glass powder box evokes memories of my cousin and I playing with our grandmother’s face powder, also kept in a similar container. My grandmother’s powder box had a tinge of pink from her face powder stored inside. Besides her powder, my grandmother’s box held a large, to two small girls, powder puff, soft and fluffy. In my mind’s eye, I see tiny spots of powder, not yet smoothed out, on her mahogany dresser. That always happened later when we tried to cover our tracks. We weren’t allowed in the powder. We were allowed, however, to get into the other glass box that contained hairpins and bobby pins. My cousin liked to give me new hair styles. With my medium length, straight hair, that meant changing the part or pulling the top and sides back while the back remained “long” and straight. Sometimes we had rubber bands and ribbons with which to work. After our hair was beautiful, sometimes with toilet paper streamers, we got into the powder and the closet.

I would wear my grandmother’s red high heels while my cousin would snag the minks to wear around her neck. Then we were ready for our fashion show.

I miss my cousin who died at forty-five from lung cancer.

Self-pampering

It is Saturday afternoon and I have just finished taking a relaxing soak in my new tub. What a feeling of wealth and decadence to have spent forty-five minutes breathing in the good energy of the moment. I am a firm believer in pampering myself when I have worked hard most of the day.

I did have company in my bath. Yin and Yang joined me, taking turns seeing how the water might feel to their paws. Yin was braver than Yang and walked the tightrope around the tub. She is the risk taker of the two.

I am feeling much more satisfied and settled now that I finished the downstairs cleanup following the bathroom remodeling. Things are either put or thrown away, and I can see order again. It seems to me that when my home is in disorder, my thoughts and my life are in disarray also. I certainly feel much calmer not having to fight my way around boxes and other paraphernalia.

I hadn’t realized that such a disorganized mess drained my energy as much as it did. For the first time in two weeks, I allowed myself to sleep in until I was ready to wake up. I slept until 10:45, terribly late for me.

When I finish here, I will eat a very late lunch and then prepare to attend a dolphin meditation in a group with whom I often do weekend classes. I am looking forward to this treat as I have not done one before.

How good can life get? Not much better than this for me.

Breakfast

Breakfast at our house was a family ritual, missed only in case of death. My mother didn’t allow anyone out of the house without breakfast, regardless of how late we were running. This unspoken edict included my father. She backed up her rule with the fact that she was a dietician. She knew what was good for us.

Breakfast was not cereal, unless it was cooked cereal. Cooked cereal meant oatmeal, the one food you could live on for months if you included milk with it. Eggs, bacon, buttered toast and juice were the usual fare. The juice was always freshly squeezed, orange or grapefruit. If we had tomato juice, she had put it up in the summer. She did vary how she cooked the eggs. If they were fried, they were cooked in the grease from the bacon, or rarely sausage. (I suspect Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was silently influencing her lack of sausage,) She used a spatula to ease the hot grease over the top to set the yolk. Poached eggs were swirled in boiling water and served on toast. Scrambled eggs were my favorite for some reason, Soft boiled eggs, with a dab of butter on top were usually reserved for sick days. I loved the toast because it was always served with homemade jelly or preserves. One day when I was nine, I ate five pieces of toast with strawberry preserves on them. Grits came later, when we moved to Florida.

At fifteen, I began pushing breakfast later every day until I reached 2 P. M., but, I ate breakfast. I suspect that was one battle my mother chose not to fight.

I married and the breakfast routine started again. I found this task particularly annoying when I had to be at work at 7 A.M. Annoyed or not, I cooked breakfast. I began to slack off while I was pregnant. I suspect now that it was my fear of morning sickness, which I never had.

In my late twenties, after our daughter was born, I went into full rebellion. I would not eat breakfast except for dinner. However, there were some notable exceptions:

Breakfast with my husband at the Alta Mira Hotel in Sausalito was memorable. We sat outside on the terrace, drinking Ramos gin fizzes while eating eggs benedict. It was the thoughtfulness of the gesture that was most memorable. Our daughter had just broken out with roseola, after a harrowing couple of days fearing meningitis.

I breakfasted, at a conference, with a man who would be my second husband. We sat in the intimate dining room overlooking a pond with ducks. I remember only drinking coffee and talking for hours. It was the most relaxing afternoon I had spent in years.

Sunday breakfast in a French cafe in St. Augustine with a lover. We had delicious French pastries and excellent coffee. The ambiance of the cafe along with delight in my lover made for a fabulous breakfast. It set the tone for a long, lingering Sunday.

While doing some family of origin work for my doctorate, I wrote about the death of my mother’s older brother. She was nine when he died. He was twelve. According to my mother, my grandmother had been up all night with him. Harold came into her bedroom announcing, “Mama, would you please fix me some breakfast. I’m as hungry as a horse!”

My grandmother apparently asked for thirty more minutes of sleep, which Harold cheerfully granted her. Within that thirty minutes, Harold died. Suddenly a piece of the puzzle clicked into place. To a nine year old, going without breakfast meant you die.

Today, when I walked around the lake, I wanted breakfast. Not an ordinary breakfast, but a breakfast with friends in an elegant restaurant. Instead, I’m writing about it.

Gratitude Abounds

What a beautiful day this has become. I got up and out fairly early, taking my car to the shop to see about my air-conditioning and automatic windows. The A/C is fixed and works beautifully. The windows--well, the motor is ordered for the driver’s side and the passenger’s side now works. All of this was accomplished while I read a Margaret Atwood novel. What a treat!

Afterwards, I was able to walk around Lake Ella without feeling terribly strung out by the heat. I wonder if that is because I didn’t arrive over heated. After my walk, I came home and relaxed. I even had lunch outside on my screened-in porch. The first meal I have had outside since early spring.

I read some more and enjoyed the company of Yin who thought I made a good pillow for her while she scratched her head on my book. When it got too hot or too humid, I’m not sure which, I came back inside. I am now doing laundry and reflecting on my idyllic life.

The air-conditioner is running and the sirens scream somewhere on North Monroe or I-10. In a few minutes I will begin to do QiGong and leave the material world behind for a short time.

I could never have imagined my life today when I was in my twenties. Funny, I never thought about now. I guess I expected to be caught up in family without the benefit of my degrees, talents or interests. Instead of being at the beck and call of numerous children and grandchildren, I have time to paint and to write. How glorious is that!

My daughter and her family live in Seattle, clear across country from me. This way I am not in her business, but minding my own. I think it improves our relationship. As I write this, Kim and I are emailing as if we are IM-ing. Thanks to Google’s celebration of Beatrix Potter’s birthday, we were each reminded of my mother and her grandmother who often sent Kim a piece from Potter’s collection for her birthday which comes up in a few weeks.

Several years ago, my first boyfriend and I connected after many years of silence. Had I married him, I would probably have had three children and several grandchildren by now. I would not have a college education. I would not be the artist that I am today. I would not be the spiritual person that I am today. I may have followed the religious path rather than the spiritual path.

I really am glad that I am where I am today.