A Full Circle

When I was a child there was a Mimosa tree at the South end of our house. I loved to pull off the tiny little leaves and the spidery looking flowers, put them in bowls of water and pretend I was making meals for my "family"...a pretend household of children and a husband. The meal in the bowl would change from Chicken & Spaghetti (a specialty of my mother's), to beef stew, to Chicken & Dumplings (my favorite comfort food from childhood.)

Image by Adam Kuban via Flickr

There's no telling how many bowls of pretend Mimosa meals I made as a little girl and I seem to remember loving to make the concoctions. Now, my brother told me yesterday, "Memories tend to get modified through the years and our minds can make them better or worse than they really were." So I may not have thought as much then about the Mimosa tree as I do now, but it left a deep memory in my brain.

I was letting our beagle out in the backyard today. I hadn't been in the backyard in a while because a potentially life-threatening allergy to fire ants tends to keep me out of the grass. I was surprised to see a Mimosa tree growing from both sides of our fence. In seconds I was transported back to the house where I grew up, mixing Mimosa leaves in a little plastic bowl.

Its amazing how quickly something can take us back in time and remind us of things we had forgotten, how it can pull those memories to the forefront and make forty year-old play-times seem as if they had just occurred.

Time is so misleading, so unreal. When you are a little child playing, the day takes forever to pass. A week is unending and a month interminable. As you become an teenager, things speed up a little. The days go faster, especially if you have a term paper due. As an adult, the hands on the clock become high-powered. With each passing decade, the speed accelerates and the days blur into weeks, the weeks skate into months. I look up from January and see July written on the calendar.

I have gone from the little girl playing with Mimosa leaves, to the grown woman looking at a surprise Mimosa tree in her backyard so much faster than I would have ever dreamed. I look at my eighteen year old, who still thinks the clock drags by, and wish to tell her to enjoy each minute, each day, each week. I want to tell her that they will go by so much more quickly than she thinks. But I don't tell her because I know there is no way will believe me.

I have to remind myself that, as my husband often says, "It is early in eternity." My life does not end here. There is waiting an eternity stretching ahead of love, joy and peace that will never end. I'm younger than I thought!

"So shall we ever be with the Lord."

I Thessalonians 4:17