Shaking off the ashes

Colleges in small retirement towns in Florida attract an overly
imaginative crowd. Such as myself and Daphne, my accomplice on
adventures through moonlit grounds of the coastal campus.

She also taught me to read tarot and gave me my tarot deck. I always
got the Tower, a disturbing card with people jumping out of a burning
tower like a fairytale gone awry. I soon came to identify the power
of renewal and reinvention implicit in the card.

The phoenix rising from the ashes, to borrow other mythical imagery.

If I pulled a card when I woke up, it would have been the Tower. Time
to wake up and shake off the ashes. Even the weather, rather than
continuing the mellow settling into contemplative autumn rebounded for
the day to summer, giving off the renewal of spring, a perfect excuse
to don my new desert sundress before cold weather sets in.

Perhaps it started with the contact lens fitting: nothing like new
fresh contacts in a new fresh prescription to give you a new outlook
on the world.

Or, the haircut. I wanted change, though I wasn't sure what it would
look like. I left it to the expert. Side bangs, apparently, is what
I wanted and needed all this time.

Still, fate had a larger plan. My sunglasses broke leaving the salon,
forcing shopping for a new pair to hide the dark circles under my eyes
that terrorized me as I stared at myself in the mirror for the last
hour.

Which made me contemplate the dark circles. Why? When I am on
vacation and getting lots of sleep. So, on the way home I stopped at
Trader Joe's to buy some chicken, ending my current three year stint
as a vegetarian.

Despite the summer weather, I didn't want to sit home where the ashes
might resettle in my new hairdo, so I indulged in a cup of the
seasonal pumpkin spice coffee (I love all spiced and pumpkin).
Perhaps basking in the aura of all the other Studio City writers in
Starbucks, I actually began to outline my novel. And there, I admit
it: I have an idea for a novel.

After all the work and changes, I thought a bit of the familiar, a bit
of quiet would do me good, so I decided to go to my old church's
meditation service before salsa. I sat in the empty candlelit
sanctuary, remembering the healing I found in the choir loft,
remembering how this is the first vacation in five years I did not go
Florida, remembering why that is, and, knowing I can't go back,
understanding the dark circles despite vacation.

But, just in case I might feel like curling backup and rolling in the
ashes, fate once again said, "No under my watch." At the end of
salsa lessons, my salsa teacher proposed prepping our class for a
performance (or performances, perhaps). The idea both terrifies and
delights. Then again, after a lifetime convinced I am tone deaf, I
made it through three years in a small choir.

I sealed of the day of the Tower, the day of the Phoenix with a lovely
celebration of wine a movie.