Floral Shorts and Muscadines Remind Me of His Mercy

A while back my mom took my sister and I shopping at a Spring sale Old Navy was having. Styles are cycling back around and what was once popular when my Mom was a girl is once again becoming the latest trend. Many of the prints and colors were familiar to me. Mostly I remember the shoes from Mom's closet but I guess when we were younger we also had some old hand me downs, mostly dresses. I got a pair of navy blue shorts with pink and blue flowers plastered onto it. I like them a lot but whenever I look at them I cant help but remember the hideous dresses Mom used to make me wear when I was little. They had flower print just like my shorts and one had big puffed sleeves and soft gathers at the hem so my dress looked like that one sleepy cartoon dog - Droopy is it? - Anyways, I don't know why but I had so many floral print dresses and I hated them all. I swore I would never ever wear dark colored with medium sized contrasting flowers on top clothes... especially dresses. Now here I am wearing a pair of shorts that if they were a dress I would immediately throw into the donate pile. Go figure.

The other day my brother was listening to country music and one of the lines in the song is "sweeter than muscadine wine" How many of y'all know what a muscadine is? Well you won't have to wonder long because I'll tell you. They're summer. They are komorebi (the soft light that turns leaves into glowing fireflies). They're the gentle breeze that sneaks under the thick vines and cools a little girls legs but not her sweaty brow. She is almost completely out of sight under the thick growth, her waist and legs rest in the moist dirt as the rest of her strains reaching up and up, to the very center of the friendly vines where she plucks the very last fruit. She collapses and rests on her elbows that are digging into the soft earth and plops the muscadine into her mouth. She sucks on it and then pulls it out and carefully begins peeling off the skin to reveal the green inside. It matches the glowing leaves. Finally she eats it. Muscadines are the perfect day.

Cinderella

I know I talk a lot about the ways my life has gone wrong, and it may be easy to get the idea that my life was nothing but torture for me, but there were many many good times that I haven't written about yet. It's not that I don't want to its just that the scary parts stand out more than the times that I smiled I guess. Anyways, rest assured, there was a time when I was a very happy little girl and that time is not at all lost upon me.

In many ways I grew up with a normal American childhood. I learned to ride my bike, I was involved with sports from a young age, swimming, baseball, basketball etc. I shared a room with my sister and played Barbies, and of course watched cartoons in the mornings. I loved Mickey Mouse and his friends, and enjoyed watching other classics like the Pink Panther, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Flintstone's, The Jetson's and Under Dog. Aside from cartoons we watched movies too. We watched old live action movies, CGI, claymations... but honestly, the ones I remember the most would have to be the Disney animations.

One movie Disney is famous for is Cinderella. I don't really know why since they didn't do a particularly good job, but you will have to admit, almost every little girl you will meet will have watched Disney's Cinderella. I of course watched that Cinderella movie too but you may be surprised to know that my fairy tale education did not stop with one multi-million dollar company's interpretation of said stories. Mom bought different versions of different fairytales and we watched them all. We had books too of course (like Grimm's) but I remember the movies the most. My absolute favorite fairytale movie was one live action Cinderella movie where the step sisters were hideous, cruel, pale red heads and Cinderella was a breathtakingly gorgeous black girl with a beautiful, vivid, dazzling blue dress. I remember watching that movie twice over in the same night one time! I loved it so much and I loved her. It's been years since I have watched that version of Cinderella. I have no idea who the actor was or what the name of the movie was. Even better, one time my parents took me to see a Cinderella play!