Mud Pies for the Soul

I had forgotten all about them. Warm, Summer days in Granny's back yard.


The weather yesterday was just gorgeous. The boys and I went out back to soak up the rays. I tried sitting and jotting down thoughts in my Notebook as the boys played in their tree-perches, but negative thoughts kept creeping into my mind. I decided I needed to burn some energy, so I put on my gloves and grabbed the hedge clippers. I started some shit with the honeysuckle. As I snipped branches and slung them behind me, I allowed the negative thoughts to flood through me. I just opened up and, as Husband says, "sat in the room with it." The flood wouldn't stop, though, it got worse. It wasn't long before I was pretending that certain people were the vines, twigs, and branches, and I began snipping away violently, even going after thick stems that the clippers couldn't really handle. Damn my arms are sore today!

Then it happened. I turned around to "fuss" at the boys because they were getting slack about moving the branches away to "the pile." They had a full baking session going on. Josiah had two butter knifes chop, chop, chopping dirt, like a chef. They had a dog bowl full of mud batter mixed up, one mud pie ready to bake in a frisbee pan, and they were spooning out mud cookies onto a board. They took them all over to a sunny spot to "bake".

And just like that, all was right in our world.

I returned to my snipping, but my snipping changed. The tree was my soul, and I was snipping away twigs of bad energy. Snip, snip, snip.