Florrie's Notebook

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The Notebook is a section of Florrie's Garden dedicated to collecting simple musings about my everyday life. Experiences lived, inspiration found, lessons learnt. Here I nurture seeds of thoughts, feelings and experiences, tending them toward blossoming into full reflections.

Previously Blossomed

2025

January 1st • While I am Getting to Know Florrie

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I feel like the truest version of myself when I step through the door of the house where my childhood lived. I recently returned home for the holiday season and was welcomed by a tender warmth of familiarity. The hardwood kitchen table, handcrafted by my grandfather as a wedding present to my mum, bears the faint scratches of my pens and pencils in the place where I sat every morning to complete my schoolwork. The shade of the tall pine tree over the front lawn, where my friends and I would compete to see who could fit the most pinecones into their dress pockets. Every corner of that place hums with a quiet atemporality, as if time had curled cosily into itself like a sleeping housecat, content and unbothered. Here, all the selves I have been seem to linger in the same moment, alive and present. Yet, when I reach out for them, they dissolve like mist into the air.

There is a tenderness in the act of revisiting: a walk through the quiet rooms of the house, the taste of a meal at the family table, a book read beneath the tree. These are simple figures, perfectly still in a world which changes with each passing second. They bear the weight of memory without discontent. They are storybooks of life itself, written by hands that were once smaller, less pragmatic and once full of curiosity. Still, I wonder why my past feels so tangible, when the present itself still rushes onward in its endless becoming? Why am I mesmerised by the echo of what once was, reaching not only for the sweetness of nostalgia but for some trail which might lead me to what I can yet become?

Time, I have learnt, is not a river but a field. The years do not flow in a current but unfurl all at once, like blades of grass swaying to the wind. This moment in which I write this notebook under the shade of the pine feels no more or less concrete than that childhood day when I crouched beneath its sheltering branches, shielding my favourite pair of shoes from the rain. The child I was then has not disappeared; she is simply a part of a bigger picture, a colourful shard in the stained-glass window of who I am becoming. And perhaps this is what it means to age, after all. Not to leave behind, but to carry forward. To let the self blossom into all it can be without losing the seed from which it sprang.

Lately, I have been learning to find peace with the truth that I have grown into both more and less than the dreams I once carried. The little girl who spent endless hours lost in the pages of fairy-tale books is the same person who now wonders what it might be like to speak with birds, who wanders the woods when the responsibilities of life feel too great, and who travels great distances to stand before old castles or to dance in flowing dresses. And how could I fault her if the storytelling is never finished, just as the seasons are never still? The tree grows taller, but the roots remain where they were first planted. And what am I seeking when I look back? Is it simply to remember, or is it an attempt to find a great foretelling of who I am fated to become?

Maybe the answer really lies in the quiet spaces, in the slant of sunlight through the kitchen window and in the scent of pinewood carried by the wind. These are the moments where time softens, where the boundaries between past and present dissolve. But if the answer does not come to mind, if the memories of the girl I once was grow fainter with time and I glimpse no grand foreknowledge of who I am supposed to become, my wish for this life is that I may understand this one truth: that people are always both an echo and a promise, shaped by the weight of what we have been and the wishfulness of what we might yet be. And in this ever-growing sense of self, as I get to know Florrie —my heart, my hopes, and my becoming— I pray to find not a spoiler of the ending, but the tender restart of the story, beginning anew, again and again and again.