Light Ribbons - @Short Story

Light Ribbons - Part One

Light Ribbons

by sloanranger

Part One

Marian arose two minutes before the alarm went off; full of excitement, she put the kettle on in the kitchen. She went and rinsed the sleep from her eyes and cleaned her face and teeth. Returning to the stove, she prepared The Cup and brought it to the small room she used for a studio; she was ready to start.

How often was knowledge lost, she thought? Simple knowledge especially, was frequently gone for generations. Bits and pieces might remain - small clues, but so much had to be rediscovered over and over again. Even she had had trouble regaining the true quality of rosemary for several lives.

Then - in the mid - 20th century somewhere around the 1960s everyone was rediscovering older arts: embroidery, cookery, even pottery and how to macrame.

Marian had become interested in herbs. Experimenting and learning, she'd become skilled enough eventually to call herself an herbalist.

Filling orders by mail out of her home at first, she soon had a small retail shop in town. She was drinking a cup of the tea one day, and enclosing one of the small folders within the order, that showed the uses and traditional meanings of the herb.

Something struck her suddenly. Glancing at the little folder: Rosemary is for remembrance. Of course. Thoughts cascaded through her mind like dominoes.

Then, drinking tea from the herb daily, Marian soon found that she could recall minute things from her childhood. Within weeks, she began having the dreams. They were dreams of places she had never been, some of them were quiet, intimate dreams - peaceful and romantic - others, wild and exotic.

And she soon noticed there seemed to be one personality running through all of them. A relative, sometimes a sister or child - but more often he was male and a romantic figure. By the second month she could discern what she believed was a chronological order to events. In time, Marian was having not verbal, but mental conversations in the dreams.

The woman fell in love with her dream-mate and through him began to recall lifetimes they'd had together. The last one was particularly vivid - probably because it was so brief and because it occurred only a century ago. His name had been Peter then.

(To be continued).