a new woman

 my cousin is in town. Today we went to the Discovery Center of Idaho. It is the closest thing to wonderland that I can think of on a rainy Wednesday afternoon with ready-to-laugh company by your side. We wound through the rooms, and as two independent, curious, explorers of the world will do, Mikki and I lost each other to the intrigue of the whistling, singing, whirling innards of the world around us. I happened to come across something called  The looking glass. For visual learners and comic relief here is a picture of some total strangers who probably didn't want to be on my blog sitting at the looking glass.

Are you done laughing? If not, continue anyway, my philosophical waxing is, at times, taken better with a dose of humor.

I walked up to the contraption and sat down. From my chair it looked like a regular vanity with a very flimsy mirror. Still, I analyzed myself and waited for my company to come help me test it out. I mentally noted everything wrong with my appearance and cringed at the stitches on my forehead. And then I smelled soft after-bath powder, and the tails of a sigh I looked up and saw a woman leaning steadily toward seventy looking over my shoulder in bemusement. I asked her if she'd sit on the other side and try it with me. The light on both sides of the two way vanity was set on high and I dimmed mine first, and as I did, my face melted away. I saw powdered cheeks, papery, as though the pages of every calendar day had been thrown in with the wash and lain to dry along the curves of her high cheek bones.  I faded and the next fifty years filtered through tinted glass and shone in that dark room. The peace of having lived; having decided and done all I can to make a full life and left to look through the glass at the wonder of it all.

I turned the dimmer back up on my side just as she began to turn hers down, and when she did, she all but disappeared, she became a faint ghost of reassurance on the other side. And then I heard her suprised laughter. On rising note expressed all I needed to hear about the return of the lithe pulsating kinetic life she'd suddenly been turned round and allowed to face again, in the same direction she'd come the first time. I previewed the joy at looking in a mirror and somehow losing the last forty years. Her daughter had found her and was looking over her shoulder. The ghosts in the looking glass spoke.

"Look at that," she said. "A new woman."

There is so much coming.

images courtesy of scidaho.org