Month: March 2026

Begin Again.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

There’s something about spring that feels deeply personal. 

All winter long the world sits quietly – bare branches stretched against grey skies, gardens emptied, the earth cold and still. Everything looks like it’s gone dormant, like life has stepped away for a while. And in many ways, we do the same. 

Winter has a way of stripping things down, it slows us. It quiets us. Sometimes it leaves us feeling just as bare as the trees outside our windows. 

But then slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, spring arrives. 

It doesn’t rush in loudly. It comes in small ways – the soft return of birdsong in the morning, the first stubborn shoots of green pushing their way through the soil, the way the air suddenly smells different. Warmer. Brighter. Alive again. 

When you live surrounded by the woods, you feel it even more. 

The forest begins to wake up around you. The birds return first, filling the quiet mornings with a kind of music that winter had taken away. The sunlight starts filtering through the trees in softer, warmer beams, reaching places it hasn’t touched in months. And when you step outside, you can feel it immediately – the gentle warmth of the sun on your face, the crispness of the air that still carries a hint of the nearby ocean. 

There’s something about the mix of pine, damp earth, and salt water that makes you breathe a little deeper. 

And then come the colors. 

After months of muted browns and grays, little bursts of color begin appearing everywhere – tiny wildflowers along the trails, soft green buds on the trees, bright blossoms scattered like confetti across the landscape. It’s hard not to notice how intentional it all feels. 

God could have made the world in simple shades. The trees could have stayed brown, the flowers could have bloomed without color, the skies could have remained a quiet gray. 

But instead, He wove beauty into creation. 

He painted wildflowers in soft purples and yellows, filled the trees with bright new green, and scattered color across the earth in ways that serve no purpose other than to delight us. It’s a quiet but powerful reminder of His kindness – that He didn’t just give us a world to live in, but one meant to be enjoyed. 

Every bloom feels like a small love letter written into nature… It’s why I love it so much. 

A reminder that we are cared for. 

And something inside us responds. 

Spring is more than a season. It’s a reminder that dormancy isn’t the same as ending. That the quiet seasons of our lives are often the ones preparing us for something new. 

After months of feeling still, we begin to reawaken. 

We start rediscovering the little joys we forgot we loved – the warmth of sunlight on our skin, the sound of birds chattering first thing in the morning, long walks where the air smells clean and the world feels awake again. Even familiar things feel new, as if we’re seeing them with fresh eyes after being tucked away for so long. 

These moments seem small, but they carry a kind of magic. 

They remind us that joy was never gone. It was simply waiting. 

Spring also has a way of reconnecting us with old versions of ourselves. 

The part that loved spontaneous plans. 

The part that laughed easily. 

The part that felt hopeful about what was ahead. 

Those pieces were never lost during the quiet months. They were just resting beneath the surface, like seeds waiting patiently under frozen ground. 

And when the season changes, they begin to rise again. 

But spring doesn’t only bring back who we used to be. It introduces someone new, too. 

The person we are after the quiet seasons is never exactly the same as before. We carry the lessons winter gave us – the resilience, the surviving hard or heavy moments. When we step back into the light, we do so as both our past and our future selves at once. 

That’s the beauty of reawakening. 

We don’t have to choose between who we were and who we’re becoming. Spring teaches us that growth is layered. Old roots support new blossoms. What was once bare can bloom again in ways we never expected. 

Maybe that’s why spring feels so emotional sometimes. 

Standing outside, feeling the sunshine warm your face while the birds chatter above you and the ocean air drifts through the trees, you realize the world never truly stopped. It was only resting. 

Waiting for the moment it could begin again. 

And maybe we were too. 

Spring whispers something gentle but powerful to us every year: 

You are allowed to begin again. 

The Places Where Grief Finds Me.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

Grief has a way of appearing in the smallest moments. 

Not always in the dramatic ones. Not always in the anniversaries or the days we expect to hurt. Instead, it slips quietly into ordinary life – while driving somewhere familiar, hearing a song on the radio, or when something funny happens and your first instinct is to reach for your phone. 

And then you remember. 

Last year, within six months of each other, two of my dear friends left this world. Even now, it still feels surreal to say that out loud. There are moments when my brain simply refuses to accept it, as if at any moment they’ll pop back into the rhythm of everyday life where they’ve always belonged. 

So often something will happen – a piece of news, a ridiculous story, a good book, a beautiful song, a small victory, a bad day – and they are two of the first people I would have called. 

I still feel the impulse sometimes. The automatic reach toward the phone. The thought forming before reality catches up. 

And then, there’s that quiet pause where I remember they’re not here to answer. 

Songs have become time machines. A few notes of the right one can transport me instantly – back to a car ride (specifically the Teen Challenge van), a laugh that went on too long at a completely inappropriate time, a conversation that felt important even though at the time it seemed ordinary. Music has a way of carrying people with it, and sometimes it feels like pieces of them are still moving through the world that way. 

I hear those songs and for a moment it’s like they’re nearby again. 

Losing them has shown me something I never fully understood before, but has been a long lesson in the making – in fact it’s where this blog was born from: grief isn’t just pain. It’s also evidence of love. 

The depth of missing someone is proof of how deeply they were woven into your life. Every moment I wish I could tell them something, every story I wish they could hear, every time I laugh and instinctively think they would love this – those moments are the shape their friendship left behind. 

Grief is the shadow of love that doesn’t have a place to land anymore. 

And strangely, there’s beauty in that. 

There’s beauty in realizing how rare it is to find people who become part of the way you experience the world. The kind of friends who would have been on the other end of every phone call, who would have understood the story before you even finished telling it, who somehow made life feel bigger simply by being in it. 

Life feels even more fleeting than it did before. 

It’s fragile. Temporary. Precious in a way we often don’t realize until we’re forced to I think about all the things I wish I could still tell them – updates about life, small daily observations, things that would only be funny to them. 

Sometimes I still say those things out loud, half joking, half hoping the universe carries the message somewhere. 

Because love doesn’t really disappear. It just changes form. 

It lives in songs. 

It lives in memories. 

In the quiet instinct to share something with someone who shaped your life. 

And maybe that’s one of the strange gifts grief gives us – it keeps the people we love woven into the way we move through the world. 

So when a song plays and I think of them, or when something happens and my first thought is to call them, I try not to push the feeling away. 

Instead, I let it stay for a moment. 

Because missing them means they mattered. 

And what a beautiful thing it is to have had friendships that still echo this loudly, even after they’re gone. 

Carrying Both – Of Motion and Stillness.

~ The Fragrance of my Mother ~ Leave a comment

“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” – Dr. Seuss

Time is funny like that. 

In my twenties it felt like motion- airports, new cities, late nights, early trains, always somewhere else to be. My life could fit in a suitcase. I would leave on a whim and the world felt enormous and wide open. I chased sunsets in unfamiliar places and lived off curiosity, wine and adrenaline. 

Now my thirties look quieter. A cozy apartment tucked into the woods. Mornings that start slow. Familiar trails, familiar mugs, familiar peace. Trying to grasp sobriety.  A life that doesn’t move so fast. 

And if I’m honest, sometimes it’s conflicting. 

Some days I miss that girl who was always on the go, who collected passport stamps, boarding passes, train tickets and stories like they were oxygen. Sometimes I even grieve that life a little. The freedom, the chaos, the constant motion. 

But I’m learning that this is life too. 

I’m learning how adventure doesn’t always look like a boarding pass or running away. Sometimes it looks like building a life that feels safe. Sometimes it’s learning to stay. Sometimes it’s learning how to be still. 

There are moments I feel a little lost between those two worlds – the wanderer I was and the woman learning to put down roots. But slowly, I’m figuring out how they can exist together. 

How to keep the curiosity. 

How to keep the adventure. 

How to carry that girl with me, even here. 

Maybe time doesn’t ask us to choose who we were or who we’re becoming. Maybe it’s just teaching us how to bridge the two. 

The traveler and the homebody. 

The chaos and the calm. 

And somehow… make a life that holds them both. 

Earlier tonight, I was looking through old photos, and my heart ached a little for that rush of adventure again – the unknown streets, the fleeting sunsets, the dizzying freedom of it all. But there was also a quiet excitement, a curiosity about what life is going to look life moving forward.

How will I carry the girl in her twenties who roamed the world into the woman in her thirties who now calls this cute little place in the forest home? 

I suppose only time will tell, and somehow that feels like the adventure I’ve been waiting for all along…