Imagine...

Today, if you could close your eyes and imagine a time in your life that you could magically go back to, where would it be?

Like a prayer, close your eyes and imagine that time, that place, what does it look like? Feel like? Smell like? The only thing you can bring with you is the you you are now. Where would you go?



Half asleep, lying in my twin bed that is shored up against the log cabin wall closest to the waters edge. I am at our camp on the New Meadows River, 10 years old, it is early summer.

The windows, screened ran all along the outer wall of the enclosed cabin porch and had old rod iron arms that stretched and lock them open. On this night they are partially open. The air is thick with a foggy mist, not over salt laden like home on Great Island, but wet enough so when you walked down the hill to the outhouse your nighty and skin were damp from it.

Lying in bed the only light on in the camp was the one beside my fathers chair where he sat, feet up, reading the newest paperback thriller from Bookland and listening to the RedSox game on the transistor radio to the left of his chair. That light illuminates the rafters above my head, casting shadows in the corners making the spider webs more iradesent and somehow larger then the daytime.

Dad's chest clearing cough was comforting, he was always there and falling asleep was easy.

Eyes still closed... I explore the world around me, almost always outdoors. At 10, I can be anything I want to be as long as I am not in the way of the dailiness of the house hold. I have finished my chores that are posted and expected to be done without asking and am off to busy myself with any variety of things.

I am a mermaid, if the tide is high in the alcoves of the brackish water. Canopies of tall oaks and maples surround me as I swim off the ledges transforming from mermaid to harbor seal back to a little girl. I can hear my voice echo with the smallest of whoo hoo's, it is peaceful here.



I am a writer, at my little desk that my niece now has in her downtown apartment. I am writing stories, secret diary entries, comic strips, letters, poems and if I am at a loss, transcribing long stanzas from old books that mom would buy from antique shops or estate auctions. It is fun and feels very collegic.


The writer becomes a secretary at a real estate office, "Baribeau Real Estate, how can I help you?" This memory, I am bouncing around in my father's truck, running his errands with him and am awe struck by how much fun it would be to have a phone at my little desk and pretend I was that fancy secretary too!  Then the secretary turns into a bank teller with extra deposit slips tucked in my drawer that Dad would let me take along with a bank pen when we went there as well. After hours the writer, the secretary and the bank teller would become an artist. Collage, coloring and painting materials would all come out and nothing was off limits.

Closing my eyes and imagining a time like this, even just for a few minutes brings a joyful remembrance and a peaceful calm in a time that is uncertain. At 10, I didn't know what was going to happen from day to day either. I was safe where I was as long as I was home and lived within the confines of what others, mostly the ones that I trusted and could count on deemed important and for my safety. The rest of the world could fall away and I wouldn't have known any different.

Today we do know all about the world, all the options, all the scenarios, worse case and best. But the knowing of it doesn't seem to help right now. We can watch the news till our eyes fall out but it doesn't seem to help much or make anything better for us today.

So, my simple practice today will be, not to stick my head in the sand, but to just close my eyes for a while, imagine myself in some other time or place, embrace the feeling, the sights and sounds that surrounds me there and bring them back here, to share.


Where will you go? Share this with someone who you feel might need to read it too if you want.

photo credit: judygarlandasdorothy.com

"We're not in Oz anymore Dorothy"... but that's ok, because for today I'm going to imagine that there is no place like home and home for me is to be 10~

Happy Friday Gang!

Cheers,
Denice