The Epiphany of Tiffany E. Poh:

A Child’s Treatise on Healing

By Susan Lowery/copyright 2004-2011

Chapter One:

Tiffany’s Sleepy Day

After 2 hours of putting together puzzles, redressing her dolls, painting rainbow pudding onto her new dress - and licking it off, Tiffany was bored.  She’d already done most of the things that she liked to do and it wasn’t even noon. And even though she was tired, she didn’t want to take a nap, and she was getting crabbier by the minute but didn’t know why. She started to sulk, then to throw herself around.  It seemed that she couldn’t control herself at all and worse yet, her horrible behavior felt good!  She was having a temper tantrum of the highest order.  After doing this for about an hour, she finally became very sleepy, much to her mother’s relief.  But before she fell asleep, she dangled herself rather precariously by her knees over the back of the sofa.  She looked up and imagined that the floor was the ceiling and that the light fixtures (also hanging down) were her tables.  She thought about her feet touching the ceiling and about the ceiling becoming the floor.  She always did look at her world a little differently.  What a great time it would be to walk around on the ceiling upside down, right side up!  She then closed her eyes and began day dreaming.  As she did this, she could smell the orange-raspberry cake that Evelyn, her mom, was baking in the kitchen and could hear her whipping up the creamy vanilla frosting with the hand mixer.  It was going to be glorious and she could hardly wait to sink her teeth into it tonight for dessert.  This made her mouth water in delight.

While day dreaming, she thought how wonderful it would be, to be able to fly.  She loved watching the birds outside soaring and then careening straight down from the wires to the ground, and then scooping up at the last second and shooting up to the sun.  Oh, how she wanted to be able to do that. 

Her mother had left the big windows open in the living room and, the wind whipped and tumbled through the room, tousling her hair to and fro.  She started to feel a warm, soft breeze against her cheek, and with her eyes closed, she could feel herself start to tumble through soft cotton like clouds, lulling herself to sleep.  With this, she also started to experience the cool splash of tiny raindrops gently glazing her skin, and dampening her dress.  Have you ever smelled the air after a summer’s rain? To Tiffany the smell was so fresh that it even smelled a little bit like vinegar!   Soaring through the clouds, she was ecstatic and care free.  She was also very happy to know that since she was flying - although she was daydreaming, she’d remembered to put play shorts on under her dress!  Now she could do anything!  At this, she turned up her nose to the sky, wrinkled it all up, and smiled toward the heavens.

The next thing she knew, she was doing every kind of loop-de-loop, spin and dive imaginable.  As she caught up with the birds that she’d just been watching diving and careening here and there, she matched them with aerial spins and swoops.

"Try and catch me, round robin!  Try and catch me blue, blue bird!"         She shouted while her belly bubbled with laughter.

After half a day of this, she finally wore herself out and decided to let herself down to the ground.

"Hew!" She sighed.  “I never knew flying would make me so tired and hungry."

Instantly, her dress became a brilliantly colored puff parachute filled with air.  Slowly, it delivered her to the slate roof of a building.   The roof had lots of bumpy places on it, so at first it was hard for her to keep her balance.

"Oh boy, luckily I have lots of bubble gum stuck on the bottoms of my shoes! Hopefully it’ll in turn help me stick to the roof!"  She gloated.    "And mom said that all my bubble gum did was make me look like a cow chewing her cud.....  I sure wish she could see me now!"    She had made quite a bit of a habit of talking to herself of late and yet continued on.

After she gave herself a little bit of time and a few deep breaths to gather her composure and balance, she got down on her hands and knees, crawled to the edge of the roof and looked over the side, to the ground.  With the gum still sticking to her shoes, it stretched and stretched and yet, kept her securely attached to the shingles.

"I knew that I chewed Double Bubble for a reason!" she said aloud.

As she leaned out over the shingles, she could see earthworms that had been brought up by the rain from underground.

"Oh Grandma, where are you?  I wish you were here!  They’re wriggling around everywhere and they look just like live spaghetti!"   "They're too amazing to be true."