✦ Archive ✦
The original blog of Camille Rose Mary DaSilva
Before The Marian Mystique, there was The RoseMary Tree — a record of adventure, romance, motherhood, and the wonder of ordinary life. Written between 2015 and 2018, these pages chronicle the years of becoming: a wife, a mother, a Catholic, and a woman learning to see the magic in everything.
My name is Camille Rose Mary DaSilva. I was born Camille Rose Wolaver, Confirmed as Mary, and the DaSilva happened on January 3, 2015. My inkblot is Curiosity. I love exploring — whether it's Europe or my own backyard. I love seeing the adventure in life and putting it on paper. Closing my eyes and imagining. Seeing magic in the ordinary.
— From The RoseMary Tree, 2015I think I have a syndrome called make-my-life-as-bookish-as-possible. So when I despaired of ever getting engaged, I decided I was going to make a backyard farm. Because I've read books where girls have chickens and it sounds super romantic.
Read More →I stare at my computer. I try to get work done. It is too hard. All I want to do is lie down again. "Hey, you wanna go to the library? I just feel like studying." Any kind of intervention will do.
Read More →When I was 14 years old, going through an L.M. Montgomery phase, I wrote myself a 10-year letter. This is the year I get to open it. My 24-year-old self reads it and laughs.
Read More →This day marks the first sunset of FASA. What your whole world has been built around for three months suddenly becomes a reality right in front of you. We are embarking upon something magnificent, gargantuan, and utterly complicated.
Read More →There are some days that you're driving down the road and you see a Krispy Kreme donuts shop. And some days the sign in the window is red. Which means hot. And you swerve in.
Read More →FASA has finally caught up with me. The days are chock full. When a fifteen-year-old girl stands up before a 120-piece orchestra and sings LaCrimosa like Leontyne Price, it is the kind of intense beauty that fills your heart and swells through you.
Read More →Every summer, my family puts on something called the Fine Arts Summer Academy. And it is like building the Trojan Horse. Except it's not fake. You walk past a parking lot and find Paradise — a field of wildflowers, a lane through beautiful trees.
Read More →Before I got married, I really wondered what marriage was going to be like. Everyone said how hard it would be. And then I got married. Lo and behold — it is like one perpetual date.
Read More →When I was a little girl I was crazy about Laura Ingalls Wilder. At night when I was 8 years old, I would pray that God would let me time-travel back for just one day, to know how it felt to wear dresses and ride in buggies pulled by horses.
Read More →Ice rides on the wind. It acupunctures my skin, little ice needles pricking my bare arms. I have traveled from the Southern climes of Tennessee to the very Northernmost point of the United States. Mackinac Island — no cars allowed.
Read More →Today is rainy and so we have classical guitar music playing. Yesterday was rainy and I had classical harp music playing. Ambience is created when rain and classical music collide. The Fine Arts Summer Academy felt like Narnia.
Read More →Life offers amazing moments. Like when the most wonderful in-laws in the world invite you to a week-long vacation at Miramar Beach. Then James and I decide we want to experience the Wilderness. I turn onto the first unpaved path I see.
Read More →Independence, MO. We are actually driving the direction of the Oregon Trail, across three time zones. Memories flit through my head of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Here I am, walking in that place.
Read More →I am in a pretty little attic room at the Prairie Creek Inn, with Victorian furnishings and a window that overlooks a green Nebraska field glimmering with dew. We are on a race with the sunset.
Read More →I am getting ready for the Annie Moses Band's appearance at the Grand Ole Opry tonight. American Rhapsody is officially released today. I love this music. It is cinematic and beautiful, creating a kaleidoscope of the colors that have created the American heritage.
Read More →Colorado. A Western Odyssey. Thick darkness. Restless wind. Headlights on a two-lane highway. I step gingerly through the tall grasses, watching for rattlesnakes. The wind whips my black dress around and around my legs.
Read More →We are traveling North through green farmlands and New England woods, passing through some of the same places that the Pope will visit, one or two days in front of him. In the background of all this adventure is a deep sadness — news from home that our grandmother is very sick.
Read More →Sometimes there are periods of life where you walk around in the present and you feel the past with you, at your back. This autumn I can't stop thinking about how last autumn I was newly engaged.
Read More →I peer in and see myself, my life house. All things taken for granted are noticed. All status quo is undone. Beside me is my husband. He knows every part of me, good and bad. He loves me most of all. It is a magical place, marriage.
Read More →There are times in life when you get fed up and decide you aren't going to be a sucker anymore. This Christmas tour, instead of spending hundreds of dollars at walk-in clinics, I brought my essential oils. Within the first two days, my husband is down with a very bad cold.
Read More →As a little girl I loved nothing better than historical novels. Now I'm in my second childhood. In six hours I am going to be at the airport getting ready to fly to London. I have Little Dorrit downloaded on my phone and Wolf Hall in my backpack.
Read More →I confess to writer's block. How do you put one amazing trip across the pond into one blog? When push comes to shove, the thing I brought home from England was a sense of magic. And Stonehenge. 5,000 years old. Stones standing against the cloudy English sky.
Read More →Thrumming on the tent roof. I wake. Light streams through the blue-green siding. We are camping on the edge of a Washington beach in the Olympic National Park. As a Tolkien reader and tree lover, seeing a forest of the proportions of Fangorn is utterly magical.
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"I am fiercely glad that I had done nothing to inhibit God's will. Fiercely glad that the soul inside of me had won out over a new car or a bigger house."
— How I Got Pregnant (Again), 2018The statue is the highlight of Rio de Janeiro. From almost anywhere in the beautiful Bohemian city you can see the Christ watching over the whole world from the top of one of the Sugarloaf mountains, arms outstretched, a symbol of love and power.
Read More →"I want to get away from the tourist-y part!" We walk back to the bridge, into the deserted corner of the mountain. Then we see the birds. A black cloud flying towards us. "Those are bats!!!" I open the umbrella, running like a penguin.
Read More →The heat is overpowering. The sky of Rio de Janeiro stretches blue and untouched above my head. There is a tropical magic in the air. This is the region where "The Girl from Ipanema" was composed.
Read More →February is the dreariest of months. So in order to accentuate the dreariness, we decided to make the month our Whole30 offering. The worst was that I could have no cheese. Cheese has been a long love affair for me.
Read More →We pull into DC a little past midnight. I wake up at 6 a.m., fall back asleep, wake up at 7:30. "JAMES! Wake up! We are going to miss it!!!" It is a beautiful day and we are in downtown Georgetown.
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"It has been the most incredible experience of my life and I was fiercely glad I had felt everything."
— Gabriel Elijah's Birth Story, 2017
It was Mother's Day morning, the morning I took the test. I set it on the counter in our tiny studio apartment's closet/bathroom. A quick glance told me negative. I sighed. And then it called to me.
Read More →The greatest surprise of all was that I developed a hatred for coffee. Me? I kept sipping my morning cup. Days past. Then all of a sudden, I couldn't stand the stuff. It wasn't just drinking it. It was smelling it.
Read More →What to never do when you're 8 months pregnant and suffering from The Waddle? Go to New York City. Which is exactly what I did. The Local NYC Experience sounds super fun when you are a suburb girl. It is not.
Read More →So I made the proverbial first-time-mom mistake of cancelling everything in the 9th month and sitting around in intense anticipation. 36 hours of labor. Back pain. Pitocin. And then: "Jesus, help me! Jesus, help me!" And my mama said, "Camille, He is helping you."
Read More →From the minute he gushed out of my body and I held him against my chest, we were one. I felt his thoughts and emotions, I knew his needs. My love for him was fiercely animal. Motherhood was the greatest surprise of my life.
Read More →Before I had babies I didn't realize that there is a secret world called Mama Culture. What really surprised me was how devoid of opinions it has to be if you want to be accepted. There is a right and wrong way to do everything.
Read More →Today is my birthday. In a few weeks I'll be going through childbirth too. This baby is our surprise child. There I was, sitting in the car on Christmas tour, suddenly realizing that I smelled the Pregnancy Smell. Yes. Ew.
Read More →We cannot separate mind and body. Every day is a prayer, whether I recognize it or not. And because everything is spiritual, everything is important. James and I were shocked on our wedding night to find that sex is way different than our culture depicts it.
Read More →Our surprise child. She snuck into our lives by way of persistence and grew in quietness. Less than thirty minutes after arriving at the birthing center, I opened my eyes, saw the purple crying baby beneath me, and picked her up. It's a girl.
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