Aroma therapy

My fondness for lavender goes way back. I was the first person in the family to insist that a bedroom could be painted something other than white, and when I was in high school, I had my dad paint the walls lavender.

My mom, bless her heart, has given me numerous lavender scented things over the years, including some amazing lavender honey.

And she sent me a Lavender Fairy note card, which has been stuck on my corkboard since 2001. I think this little fairy would make such a cute tattoo.

And just about the time she sent me that thank you note, I built a flower bed at the church because I had no good place at the house to plant flowers. I ordered lavender plants through the mail and put them in the new flower bed. They thrived for a long time.

Then the church closed for a while, and then it reopened, and one of the new people decided he didn’t like the lavender growing there. Without saying anything to anybody, he dug it up and stuck it in the middle of the field next to the church, where it eventually died. This all came rushing back as I read the book The Shack, because it has a great deal to say about forgiveness.

Two years ago for Mother’s Day the women at the church were given various small pots with plants of various kinds. The woman who bought the plants had been there when the debacle with the original lavender occurred, and so she got me two small pots of lavender. Being I still had no good place at the house to plant them, I once again planted it in the church flower bed

The lavender spent one year thinking about it, and then this year it bloomed. The scents of many flowers smell good to me for a few whiffs but then become sickening, so I tend to prefer flowers that don’t have a strong scent. Like these.....

...which my honey picked for me for our anniversary.

However, I find the scent of lavender to be pleasant, calming, and soothing, and when word came that the church was going to close its doors, for good this time, and that the property was going to be sold, I decided I better hurry up and find a spot for the lavender. And I did. One clump now has a new home in an old whiskey barrel and the other I gave to a friend.

And because I wasn’t sure if it was going to survive, I cut off almost all of the flower stems, stuck them in some water, and sat them by the computer.

Breathe in, breathe out...