THE SCENT OF LAVENDER

THE SCENT OF LAVENDER

I USED TO BE A MORNING PERSON. No matter how late I stayed up, or how tired I still was, I'd be up at the crack of dawn, unwilling, but relentlessly awake. The moment the sun creeps into my window, sleep is over for me. In many ways this was a good thing. When the sun rises early in the summer, I'm up, and after the blood starts flowing and the grogginess wears off, I'm energetic. I try to get most of my work done early, while the energy is high. It's a little harder in the winter, when I often have to get up before the sun, but I have always embraced that rhythm. The flip side is that I can't stay up late. Come 9 PM, I'm yawning and stretching and thinking about my cozy bed.

But everything changed when I made myself a lavender eye pillow. I first discovered them in yoga class, where we would spend the last five minutes of the session in shivasana, or corpse pose, lying flat on our backs with our arms outstretched. I'd take off my glasses and cover my eyes with a lavender eye pillow, and would instantly relax deeply. It was partly the gentle scent of the lavender, and partly the gentle weight on my eyes, blocking all light that might distract me from my relaxation. Often, I would nearly settle into sleep before Bev's voice would call me back.

 I made myself a lavender eye pillow. It was very simple. I cut a rectangle out of my favorite dress, after I finally admitted that I was not the only one who could see the tiny holes in the floral pattern. I cut it a bit wider than the eye pillows at yoga class—more like a card envelope than a business envelope. I wanted it to cover more of my face. I sewed it up on three sides and filled it with a mixture of rice and lavender buds. I drizzled some lavender oil on the mixture, stirred it and let it sit for awhile. Then I poured the mixture into the pillow and sewed up the last side. I stitched around the edges a couple of times to make sure it wouldn't leak.

WHAT IS IN THE SKY?

I keep that little pillow on my bedside table, and in the morning, when the sun gives its first, creeping call, I decide whether I've had enough sleep. If not, I grab that pillow and lay it over my eyes and let the gentle weight, the powdery scent, and the quiet darkness lull me back to sleep. The only problem with getting this extra sleep, is that it's pushing my bedtime later and later. I'm now in a cycle of late nights and late mornings, and I suppose I'll live to regret all this when school starts again.

LAVENDER EYE PILLOW

This morning, it was after 9 when I got up. I went out to feed the chickens and saw something strange and wondrous in the sky. I was a little frightened, because it was like the whole world was covered with a flossy grey blanket. The sun was nowhere to be seen, and the blanket was low over the corn and filled with puffs and swirls. I sat down in the glider, and as I looked at the sky, I could feel that I had seen something like this a long time ago. Then I noticed another strange feeling. I wasn't sweating! It was cool. I let the breeze wash over me as I sat in wonderment.

SLEEP IN BEAUTY; PRAY FOR RAIN;
BLESSED BE.

As I sat, the breeze grew stronger and started blowing holes in my protective blanket, and I could see the familiar blue of the sky. Around the pockets of blue are the bright, puffy clouds that carry no rain. And now the breeze comes from the east, pushing whole parade. For a few minutes a big hole of blue sails directly above us. The shadows return and I feel the sun on my back. I sit with my chickens, and together we wait, and wait for rain.

LOOKING FOR LAVENDER

IN BIRDLAND WE GOT A LITTLE RAIN--JUST ENOUGH TO TEASE US. Not enough to turn off the heat or dry up the dust or coax the wild blue asters into blossom. The corn is in tassel and maybe it was enough rain to get a little bit of a crop this year, but not a big harvest. The corn is sending its sweet, sweaty smell out with its pollen. It's a green, fertile smell, but not particularly pretty. Grandma always used to say that we need rain the most when the corn was tasseling, but we are still several inches down. The last rain was maybe 2/10ths of an inch, and we need an inch a week to pull us out of this drought. Even with watering my garden every evening, it grows so slowly without rain.

What we need is lavender. Lavender will bloom despite the dry weather. Last week some of my knitting friends made a trip up by Rantoul to visit the lavender farm at Sharp'sCrossing. It was hot, but the heat diffused the lovely scent so that when we got out of the car, wafts of perfume greeted us. We could see the smaller field from the road, and turned into the driveway where we saw a big, white barn with old wagon wheels spaced around the wall. A larger field of lavender was next to the barn. We went first into the barn where we could sample tiny little lavender shortbread cookies and see various crafts—soaps, tinctures, sachets, pillows, lotions, wreathes and wands—all made from lavender. In the barn we picked up scissors and rubber bands, and then went out to the fields to cut bundles. There were three varieties, I think, and I picked a bundle each of two of them. As we walked out of the barn, the owner called after us, “Cut ginormous bunches.” she said. “There's plenty out there.”

The plants grew in regular diagonal rows through heavy-duty weed barrier. They grew in pretty, rounded cushions. Some plants were already harvested, and these were hemispheres of greenery, almost like topiaries. Others had sprays of tight, blue flowers, an open invitation to the bees and other pollinators. But I didn't see too many bees. Maybe it was the drought—or the mid-day heat. One field was long stemmed, and I picked plenty of that. I cut and sniffed, and cut and sniffed until my nose didn't work any more. Then I took my bundle inside and started again in the other field. They wrapped up my two bundles in purple tissue paper and gave me ribbon and the directions for making a lavender wand. Lavender is one of my remedies when I have trouble sleeping, and a wand would be just the thing to keep by my bedside. I also got a spritzer bottle of lavender water in case the wand doesn't work its magic.

At home, I have old glass bottles in all the windows, dug up from a stream in our woods, where people sneak in to dump trash. I filled each of the bottles with a few stems of lavender to freshen the rooms. At the lavender farm they had a bunch in a vase that they said was a year old, and it was still fragrant. I figure I'll keep these in the bottles until next year, and then I'll take the buds off these stems to use for a new eye pillow. The lavender lady said to put the stems in a pillowcase and roll your hands over it to remove the buds from the stems. 

I was inspired to research the growing of lavender and found it is drought resistant. I'll get a couple of plants to add to my path to joy, or maybe I'll start another path in the sun, just west of the garden and chicken coop. One thing leads to another in my planning, and I begin dreaming about the marriage of bees and lavender: lavender honey!

Rain in Beauty; Bloom in Peace; Blessed Be.