Happy Place

When you close your eyes, what is the first thing that you see?  Is it a person you case about greatly?  Is it something that you wish you had?  For me, it's a place.  It's the place where many magical moments have happened.

I walked the rows of walnut trees nearly every Christmas of my life.  I wrote my life, sitting in the clover patches.  I was a boxcar child underneath the flume.  I sang to an imaginative audience atop an old ladder. I made friends with the man I almost married out there.  I shot my first pistol on the bank of that canal.  I fell in love over and over again.  I learned how to work.  I learned how to be tough.  I learned to love music.  I learned to love me.  I've discussed death in that orchard.  I've talked about creating life along the split rail fence.  My dreams erupted by the pasture, and the songs of my heart burst from my mouth for the first time as I walked by the turtle pen.  I became a fairy, a siren, a starlet, and a hero.  I fought battles of morals and of family.  I stood my ground sometimes, and ran for my life others.  Frogs turned into princes, lizards into dragons, and brothers into victims.  I ate from the tree of life, and tasted it's goodness.  Dresses were worn and ruined, stained with grease and pomegranates.  Old bicycles transformed into chariots worthy of use.  Voices rose and dropped; children flew.  Life was its best and its worst here.  Life stands still and keeps moving at the same tie in this special place.  This is my special place.  And if the wind is blowing around me, lifting the edges of my skirt, I can close my eyes and feel at home.  I feel the fog close in, and the sun set slowly  Trains pass in the background.  And life once again has many possibilities: anything can happen!  And once more... life makes sense.