Mona Lisa Smiles and the Climb

The summer here in the Northeast is winding down, a fact that seems to be registering in my daughter as she welcomes her last few days of sunlit freedom. We scramble to provide the last play date, day trip and summer-flavored adventure we can fit in as the first day of school approaches. I was looking at her this morning, tan and leggy in her favorite shorts, and I had to marvel at how beautiful she wears the summer. She is natural and comfortable in soft shirts and flip flops. Her hair is a shade lighter and her skin has toasted to a rich mocha which brings out her vibrant sea green eyes. She has matured this summer and its much more obvious when those little girl loose teeth are hidden by her shy, Mona Lisa smile. She looks older, less childlike. The hints of the young woman she will be are there in her candid postures and her quiet moments. I see those delicate lines of grace and poise and I find myself transfixed by her sudden and exotic beauty. My daughter is lovely and graceful in all the ways I failed to be at her age. I had been, and still very much am, a pale and ordinary child of Winter. This Summer has been good to her. It has wrapped her in its warmest embrace and made her golden.

"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 899 August 24, 2016
Prompt: "The Young and the Restless" has just celebrated it's 11,000th episode. With that in mind, what are some of your favorite episodes of your life? You can talk about your bad ones as well. I look forward to reading your entry.

I have had my share of bad episodes for certain but they are far outweighed by the good ones. A highlight reel of those good episodes would look a lot like your typical trip down memory lane with all the requisite milestones; high school graduation, first day of college, first day meeting my soul sister, a first date with the future husband, our wedding, the birth of our daughter...all those same really big "good ones" that anyone with a blessed life can claim. There has been so much more light than darkness, even if at times it seemed as if darkness was all I was due.


"Blogging Circle of Friends "
DAY 1379 August 24, 2016
Prompt: "But why did you go there in the first place?"

The end of the light came with surprisingly little drama. Like the final flicker of a dying match, the space around her winked into darkness. Mallory shifted her body in the narrow space, resting her back against the ledge. She slowly stretched one leg out, the tendons protesting, until her boot hung loosely out over a precipice that was darker still. Night was here and with its arrival, the knowledge that she had spent five hours alone trying to navigate the face of the evil Bodner's cliff washed over her.

Stuck. Five hours into her climb, Mallory had to admit to herself that she was stuck. Now having lost the light, she would be forced to wait out the night from her perch, facing long hours in which she would ask herself over and over how she had made such a deplorable decision to attempt this climb alone. She would think about her cell phone, mocking her from were it sat in her jeep's cup holder and her water bottle at the bottom of a ravine. Mallory had dropped it when she landed on the ledge, had listened to it clack and crack against rock the whole way down. She had cursed then, a stream of the worse obscenities she could muster.

Mallory had billed this climb as an empowering rise above a bad divorce. She was going to tackle the toughest cliff she could find in the fifty miles radius around the apartment she'd been forced to vacate and she was going to "climb the hell out of that bitch!". The arduous ordeal would be a catharsis. It would help her heal. The few friends she had managed to keep in the divorce had cheered her on. Her parents had upgraded her best climbing gear. Mallory had felt ready. She had not been. The cliff had bested her in the end.