Here's the one I noticed today.
The Wizard of Oz.
Once upon a time when I was a little girl I lived in McLean, Virginia. We lived there for 6 years while my dad worked in Washington, DC. The scent of freshly cut grass always reminds me of McLean. We used to play flashlight tag with the neighborhood kids in the evenings and the damp green grass clippings would stick to my bare legs as we ran around. We had a farm right behind us and I used to feed the cows the grass clippings when they poked their pink noses through our fence.
What does this have to do with the Wizard of OZ? Nothing, really.... It just came up when I was thinking of McLean.
OK, now back to the Wizard...
We had a playroom on the first level of our home. It had dolls, dollhouses, a child's kitchen and toys. I remember a large sunny window and a door that led to the driveway. My sister, brother and I spent hours in that playroom. In that room we also had a record player and lots of records. Little 45s and the bigger ones too. Our favorite thing to listen to was the Wizard of Oz. It was the sound track of the entire movie. Every line spoken, every song sung. We listened to it a lot while we played and I 'cooked' in my little pink kitchen.
One night my mom had set my sister and I up to actually watch the movie. It was on TV once a year and she thought we were old enough to watch it. I was six and Ali was 4. How wrong she was!! When it got to the part where the Wizard was yelling at Dorothy and her friends and there was fire around the wizard and the lion jumped out the window in fright...well Ali and I burst out crying, and that was the end of that, so mom gave us baby aspirin and put us to bed. LOL.
And so after that we were content to just listen to our record of the movie in the safety of our playroom, over and over, and over. I memorized it. I knew every line, every gasp, every sound effect. I was six and then seven and onto eight. It was engrained into my brain. Like learning to swim, dive(that was hard!), and rollerskate. And ride a bike. And braid my hair.
Fast forward to tonight. I was in the kitchen, making Sarah dinner and Sarah was in the living room watching the Wizard of Oz for the hundredth time and I was listening to it. I couldn't see it, just hear it. I knew every line, every gasp, every sound effect. Suddenly, I was right back to that little age of 6 in that sunny playroom, dressing my dolls, cooking, feeding my dolls and listening to that record.
So as I stood there, in my kitchen, having just dressed my daughter, getting ready to feed my daughter, listening to the Wizard, I realized I had come full circle around. Right back where I started 44 years ago. And, surprisingly, it is a very comfortable feeling. Like all is right in my world. It is as it should be. As it was designed to be, all along.
It is in a moment such as this, that my feeling that everything happens for a reason and that there is a grand design to it all, is confirmed. I am reminded to relax and let life happen. And trust in the bigger picture. Because there is one.
There are no such thing as coincidences :)
Here are a few pictures from that time:
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I was 7 here. What you can't see in this picture is that I was wearing shiny ruby red maryjanes, just like Dorothy's Ruby Slippers... now that I think about it :)
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This would be me, little brother Jimmy and younger sister Ali in our backyard.
And our puppy, a Collie named Nicky, Ali, Jimmy and myself
