Firstly, thanks so much for your calm patience. The school year is almost done; that particular madness almost over for a couple months.

Now. May tell you a story about this mug right here? Oh, OK. Thank you!

I know that, to you, it might look a bit of a mess, but I find it quite beautiful. This TARDIS mug was gifted to me by some dear ones a few Christmases ago. Completely unexpected and absolutely delightful. I love my TARDIS mug! However, one day last year, I came home from work to find this waiting for me on my stove.

My darling TARDIS all in pieces and an apologetic note from my father in law. At that time, I had just started back to work, our daughter was attending preschool/daycare half-day, and so her grandparents would take care of her in the morning and get her school at noon. My dad-in-awesome likes to keep busy and, as such, he helped out with the chores around the house. Again, this was my first year back to work since our girl had been born four years previous, and I was, honestly, overwhelmed with handling work and family and housekeeping. So I appreciated my father-in-law doing up the dishes and coming home to an empty sink. Unfortunately, in the process one day, he knocked my mug against the side of the sink just right (wrong?), and it shattered. Most of the pieces were large enough to fit back together, however, so he saved them for me.

I cried. Seriously. I sat down and cried over my broken TARDIS. My gorgeous “borrowed-and-blue” box had exploded. I snapped a picture and sent it to my tea-guru, sister-mama, and oldest friend in my adult life. She immediately suggested that I send her the pieces, and she would kintsugi them. If you do a quick Wikipedia search, you’d find that Kintsugi (“golden joinery”), also known as Kintsukuroi (“golden repair”), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. My dear wifey had done this with some of her own broken crockery before and I found myself irrationally excited by the prospect. I knew the mug would likely not be useable again, but I would have my dearly-gifted TARDIS back whole. So I packed up the pieces in bubble wrap and newspaper and sent them off to Courtney.

Before I did that, however, I sent the picture of my TARDIS-in-pieces to one other person, my friend Daniel. He is my beloved “clever boy” and the main reason that I adore the Eleventh Doctor (“Doctor Who”) so much: the character is art imitating life to me in that his playful and buoyant personality reminds me constantly of my Dan. When I sent him the picture, his response was immediate.

“Oh no no no no no. This is your fabulous TARDIS mug?! Or was this the teapot? I insist you let me send you a replacement for whichever it was. Time Ladies need their T(ea)ARDISes.”

Soon enough a new mug showed up in my mailbox, which I have happily used up to the present. Now, I will admit to embarressedly not telling the dear friends who gifted me the mug in the first place that it was broken for the longest time. I have finally just admitted to it. I think I did not want them to think me reckless with my gift, nor did I want them to be upset that it had gotten broken. (I’m sorry, dears, really-really!)

Now, flash-forward to last week. A package arrived from my wifey’s art Etsy shop; in it were a calendar and some prints that I had ordered. However, there was also another package from her waiting for me, and I had no idea what it is. Upon opening up the second package, I found my precious TARDIS 1.0, now beautifully put back together with shimmery silver lining its cracks and cementing the pieces into a whole. It was as though starlight was trying to burst out from the inside. It is stunning!

It now sits on my shelf with some other keepsakes, such as my first dip pen and the box for one of my newest gifted fountain pens, and reminds me constantly of the treasures that are my dear ones. How they have all come alongside me when I have needed them most, and shored up my heart and spirit in its darkest moments. A reminder that, while broken and cracked, there is still light. It can and does still pour through, even if just in bits. Thank you, my dears.