Didn't see a TFTD thread for yesterday, or I would have posted this there...

So I am hijacking the date to post a thought in response to the contents of yesterday's (7/15/00) mailbox.

Dear Friend,

Guess whose lovely present arrived yesterday, all surprisy-like? No note, but the return address tag, even with no name, gave it away. How many people do I know with as much Moxee as you? And who else do I know that could (and would) send something so beautiful, down to the wrappings, with one hand tied behind her back?

I grew up in rented houses. In one of these many houses, my sister and I shared a bedroom with wide windows covering most of two walls... encompassing the corner. At night, in the summer, when the windows were open, in would waft this amazing smell. Right outside, some peppermint had gone had run amok-- so thick! Completely out of control. It was a dark corner, so no one had ever torn it up to plant something else. It had been going for years. I bet the dirt there was all gone, turned to roots.

Silly me didn't know you could cut it and dry it and have it all year, so it was the annual, summer-long miracle. We stayed in that house for several years, and after a time it felt like it could be home. Some bad things happened there, but some good too, and you could always lie there in the bad times, and tell silly girlish secrets, and smell the mint.

We never had a house long enough to get mint going like that again, until my son was born and I tore out decades of wild underbrush around the house of that time, and planted ground covers all around, and peppermint by the back door for our going out and coming in. It got a good start. The landlord--who had let my mother have the tiny, old, uninsulated house for next to nothing, for years-- died. Within two months the new owner had tossed us out and torn down all its new plantings, to build two small houses crowded onto what had been a child's paradise. The ancient giant oak in the corner never recovered from the severing of its roots, we saw when we drove by in later years. I guess I was old enough by then to take my own roots with me, for in my heart I can still see the house down the street that would shine, beyond the oak, through the bedroom window, in cream and gold, when the afternoon light hit it just right. Especially in summer.

That's what I thought of when I opened your gift and unsealed the jar. And I'm going to put that lovely little mini-mason jarful you sent by my bed. When I am having a bad day, I will open it and think of you, one of the sisters I delight in now, as though you are right there telling secrets with me, and I will dream of all the good days gone... and yet to come.

~Susan