melvellous

I have a sometimes roommate, Mel. She's 61, white-haired, and fabulous. She lives with me about one week a month. I love having her around. When she departs at the end of a stay, she leaves me cheeky notes encouraging me to "bring boys home". (Then I subsequently don't.)

She recently started taking some courses in astrology, and she did my natal chart. We both view it as just an interesting way to frame stuff, and neither of us takes it too seriously, but it's fun when things seem dead on.

I am an Aries, a fire sign, with Cancer ascendant, a water sign, which supposedly explains why I am such a maniac, and exactly what kind of maniac I am.

Specifically, I am a passionate, enthusiastic, impatient, go-getter, (Aries), but super-sensitive, mushy, family-oriented, loyal, with a big range of emotions, and able to put up a cold emotional wall to protect my squishy innards when I'm stressed or threatened (Cancer baby, all Cancer) maniac.

As for the rest of my chart, not only am I a fire sign, but I am ALL FIRE, she said. Well, fire and a bit of air and water, but NO EARTH. "Well, you do have one little bit of earth, but it doesn't count." She says this means my job in life, the key to my contentedness, is to move toward groundedness, through health and exercise, through my work. (I think I'm on that one now.)

Friends have often described me as grounded, but the truth is any groundedness I get comes from skiing, hiking, canoeing, lying in grass, and maybe from my family and the way I was raised. I tend more to roll around in my head, and have had many daydreams about lifting up and floating away.

She couldn't be more right on the fire front, I pretty much feel like a furnace all the time - honestly and without exaggeration - as though there were embers burning away just under my ribcage, all day, all night. Mel says she has no fire, which is why she gets along with fiery people; she can take it, in fact, she needs it.

She figures that while I'll always get charged by air and fire people, I'll do well to connect deeply with a few earth people who will help balance me out. Trouble with earth people is they think astrology is bunk and won't get their charts done.