61 for 61

My mother sent me a check for sixty-one dollars for my sixty-first birthday with the stipulation that I use the money for myself.

Yes, a gift with strings attached.

So I bought something I hadn't bought in probably twenty years. 

The cost was more than forty dollars - and I gave the rest to Rebekah as a gift for her half birthday, which was July 7.

I ordered a bag of Claire Burke's original potpourr and two packages of scene blocks.

My godmother Marie Sherry brought me some of this potpourri as a gift nearly fifty years ago. I've loved it ever since, and I've since associated lovely scents with her.

In fact, when I was fifteen, I had a dream that she and I were wandering a lovely, old, wooden type of shop that sold candles, incense, potpourri, and all sorts of lovely things. It was a vivid dream, full of color and richness and wonderful frangrances, and the dream is one of my favorite memories of her.

Marie used to own an antique store, and she created minature diaramas that she sold at craft fairs and special orders. She was adventurous, too. 

At age eighty, she drove to California herself by visit friends. She stopped at a service station before venturing into the desert and was told one of her tires was bad and she should buy another.

Marie got out of the car, examined the tires herself, and decided nothing was wrong with them. She drove through the desert without buying a new tire. 

When she reached the other side, she stopped at another service station for a second opinion. And she had been right - her tires were fine.

At age eighty-three, she moved to a wonderful two-story apartment in Nashville, Indiana, to be closer to friends. She had never married or had children.

At age ninety, she stopped driving at night, because she lived close to a rural area and was tired of dealing with the deer.

She was proud of the fact she had never taken any medicine in her life except for aspirin for a sore knee.

Of all the potpourri I've had in my life, Claire Burke original potpourri remains my favorite.

The potpourri even inspired a detail that is intimately woven into my BryonySeries: the speically bred bryony that world-renowned pianist and composer John Simons had bred for his bride, bryony that, like the vampire plant that it is, wound itself in, about, and around, every plant and edifice on the Simons estate.

I was walking my colicky newborn Timothy in the fall of 1990, mentally the writing the story I would never officially write until seventeen years later, when my gaze fell upon a dish of that potpourri in my bedroom. And - so!

But forty dollars worth of potpourri is not an expense I can justify in my life right now. So getting a check with strings - rather, dried plants and a woodsy-musky scent - attached to it was really a wonderful gift.

And Marie was my maternal grandmother's first cousin, my mother's second, and my third. Naturally my mother liked the way I spent the money.