When it came time to pick Rachel’s birthday, I picked March 30th, because it had been the birthday of a character I used to think about as a child. Independently, John picked April 1st as Sigfried Smith’s birthday.
Imagine my surprise when, some years ago, I looked up when Easter would fall in 2024 and discovered it was—March 31st, the day between Rachel and Sigfried’s birthday.
And what better event to have happen on Easter, even if Rachel doesn’t know what Easter was, than her trip to the Foothills of Heaven.
In April of 2022, I was approaching writing this scene as Easter came. The night before Easter, I went to church with John and was very impressed with the flowers. The appearance of the opening of the trip to Heaven suddenly came to me.
All I could think about as I pictured the scene was how much my mother, who listened to every word of every book I had written, would love it. I went home and stayed up way later than I should finishing the scene.
The next morning, I jumped up earlier than I should have with so little sleep, eager for the festivities of the day, but, even more, eager to read the scene to my mom.
Only, I never got the chance.
When we arrived to pick her up for church, she had gone. As we told each other, “Jesus rose up…and he took her with him.”
Mom was 16 days short of turning 89. She took ballet classes and jogged right up to the end. She was an amazing help to me throughout the childhood of my children. Without her support, none of my earlier books would have gotten written.
This is the description I wrote that night that I had wished so much to share with my mom:
That night, at the stroke of midnight, Rachel found herself whistling along with a waltz she could not hear with her ears. She sat up and listened warily, whistling bits of the Skater’s Waltz. Then, she hopped out of bed, grabbed Vroomie, and flew out the French doors, soaring over her balcony and upward. She rose over the lip of the eaves and found herself staring in awe.
The roof had been transformed. Roses the color of the face of the moon bloomed on the ordinarily ivy-covered walls of the Old Castle, filling the air with the most astonishing perfume. The flat flagstones of the roof above her room, between the rounded stone wall of the Old Castle and the reflecting pool to the north, were encircled by dozens and dozens of pots of a flower she did not recognize. It was a lily, but the blossoms were at least seven inches long and shaped like a trumpet, with six points at the mouth that curled away from the opening. The lily itself was also moon-white, but inside each one glowed a stamen the color of candle flame. This pale golden light shone through the trumpet-like flower so that while the roses were the color of the moon, the lilies seemed to glow with the soft creamy-gold of candlelight.
Seven will-o-wisps as large as her hand hung in the air high above these flowers, forming a circle that spun slowly widdershins. Unlike domestic wisps, they had faces, bright and pixie-like, that appeared and disappeared in the curls of their pale golden flame. Below, twelve smaller wisps, these the color of moonlight and about the size of the pad of her thumb, formed a larger circle and spun in the opposite direction in time to the music.
Rachel paused, charmed by the eerie dancing wisps. She could now hear the Skater’s Waltz with her ears. The mingled scents of roses and lilies were so glorious that she would not have minded if she had never breathed anything else.
For more about my mom, you can read about her life and listen to the seven songs she wrote and recorded here.
Happy Easter, everyone! He is Risen!
What a beautiful face she has.