8 Year Anniversary

In celebration of my 8 year Anniversary with WordPress, I’m feeling inspired to share a segment of a short story I began almost 7 years ago and edited recently. The title is “Chamomile”. Character with my name not necessarily inspired by me. The full story is 10 pages.

Chamomile

My mother would coat the bottom of two mugs with honey and squeeze a fourth lemon into both, then carefully pour chamomile tea from her sunflower tea pot into them. We drank this nightly beginning with the first snow of the season that would occasionally fall in late August, ending whenever we didn’t need two heavy quilts to sleep at night, which usually didn’t come until early June. We would stare out the frosted window with five candles lit along its sill, out into the dark Wyoming sky. Her squinted eyes were usually fixated on nothing in particular that I could see, but clearly she was always focused on something significant.

She wore dark half moons under her eyes that revealed her deep exhaustion—not only from weeks of prolonged insomnia, but also from her exhaustion with the place itself.

            “This is such a sad place to live,” she once muttered while we were sitting inside watching a snowfall cascade down on one of those September nights, sipping our soul-warming tea which she believed was also responsible for us never catching any sicknesses that seemed to latch on to everyone else around us in that town. I called it Magic Tea before I even became aware of the healing and magical properties of chamomile. It sounded almost identical to my mother’s name, Camille, and for the longest time I believed that was the primary reason we drank it every night.

When I finally asked her, she told me we drank it because of its color: yellow.

“And did you ever wonder why we drink our chamomile with lemon and honey?”

she asked with a wink. They were all the same color as the sun, of course. She believed these yellow ingredients would infuse a kind of sunshine-y light into our souls when the sun went away for the better half of the year. When the first snow of the season came, we both knew we would not be seeing that mystical yellow sphere or absorbing its healing rays for at least eight and a half months. If we could not sit underneath the sun and absorb its healing light for this long, she said, at least we could drink the sun and have it shine from within us.

            I grew up with such beautiful thoughts as these planted in my head. She was a small woman with an enormous imagination and grand ideas. But for this reason, she swore we would abandon Laramie eventually. (Soon as possible, preferably.) I didn’t mind our “sad town”, because I’d grown up listening to stories of its beauty through my mother’s articulate narrations– yet she was completely oblivious to how the beauty of her words shaped my perspective of home. Whenever we took walks to the far side of town where weeds grew on the horizon of the pink and gold sunsets, she would point out specific wild plants and ramble on about their qualities and laugh when I called them weeds. “Oh, sweet Melody. These are medicinal plants, not weeds. When will you ever learn to use the correct vocabulary for such important beings in our ecosystem?”

            She was not a botanist. She did not even graduate from college at the University. She did, however, spend all of her life studying plants and herbs and all good things that come from the Earth. People adored her, generally, although some may have thought her crazy for believing in all she did.  On the way back from those walks to the far side of town, I was always exhausted. My mother, however, always seemed even more stimulated with energy, after having absorbed Mother Earth’s cool winds, energy surging through her veins. The wind blew the Earth’s life force into her lungs and it spread throughout her body, she said, which was the only reason she tolerated long walks in the wind. I enjoyed how the wind tangled my long hair around my head when we did this. Mother had always offered to braid my hair, but smiled satisfactorily when I finally admitted that I loved the wind’s embrace at such a young age—maybe seven.

® Camille M. Garcia