A few of my favorite things.

From 12-2022:

I am in my favorite room in our Centennial, CO house.  It is the smallest of the three bedrooms.  We use it on the rare occasion we have guests.  I have my teletherapy private practice niche in here.  It is my “prayer closet,” with a huge basket of files, journals, Bibles, daily devotionals, Al-Anon readers, notepads, pens.  It is where I am set up for Zoom meetings:  I just attended a 45 minute Mindfulness Meditation through Boston University with my MBSR guru, Elana Rosenbaum, DSW.

 

The two windows bring in the most beautiful morning light in the whole house, one faces east, the other south.  The largest window has a great shelf built into it.  Of course, it is full.

 

On this shelf are a few of my favorite things, just mine.  I have pared down my clinical social work counseling books to just a few. Next to those are my Al-Anon books. I have my movie star books – Audrey Hepburn, Barbara Streisand, Alfred Hitchcock, others.  There is a beautiful  cloisonné umbrella stand my Aunt Dorris gave me; a basket with notecards, envelopes, stamps, return labels.

 

Let me interrupt the flow, stop right here and ask you. When was the last time you sat still in one of your favorite spots where you live and looked around?  Just to take in your surroundings - what you see, smell, hear, what you touch? For example, the fabric on the chair/sofa/bed where you are sitting, the clothes you are wearing.  Scripture says: “Be still and know that I am God.” One of the things that is very popularized these days but has been around for millennia is meditation. Sitting still in my favorite room, and taking it in, is meditative for me. He is in the beauty.

 

I’ve collected, bought, been given, or inherited the things around me.  Mine reflect me.  One thing I do not like about the “older age” stage of life is forgetting where something came from.  Very disturbing!  Where and when I got them.  They tell the stories of my life.

 

Back to the window ledge in Centennial, 2022.  I have two plants.  One is a succulent that my beautiful CO friend Charlene gave me.  It was teeny and has already been repotted once.  The other is a purple shamrock, originally in a pot Mama put together for me in 2014 when we lived in Little Rock. Mama had dementia but before it was too progressed, she give me a pot she’d put together of different cuttings.  All in one pretty, creamed colored pot. The shamrock is the only one that lived.

 

When my husband Del and I moved from Little Rock, AR in 2017, we lived in our RV for several months until settling in Georgia. We could not take our plants so I gave the shamrock in the cream pot to our son Loddrick who lived in Bentonville, AR working for Walmart corporate (yes, I was proud).  After two years of life in “the Bubble” aka Peachtree City, GA we moved to Colorado.  We property sat a 5 acre piece of land for chaplain colleagues in Monument, Co who had one more TDY before retiring but it was in Virginia.  It was there that Loddrick gave us back the flourishing shamrock in a dark blue pot.  Now it sits on the shelf in my favorite bedroom of our Centennial home.