Happy Thoughts.

As I sit here on the window seat, a cool, sweet breeze flows past me.  The sky is blue.  The clouds are white and fluffy just perfect for seeing faces and animals and daydreaming about the stories of their lives in the sky.  

Do they know it's summer? Are they bored just floating up there?  Do they ever do anything?

As a child, summer was vacation.  Summer was riding my bike through the woods all day.  Skating up and down all the streets in my neighborhood.  Swimming all day in the neighborhood pool.  Going to the store to buy candy.  Summer was reading on my friend's covered patio from the stack of books I collected weekly from the local library.  Learning to embroider from my friend's mother.  Summer was playing ghost in the graveyard after dinner in the dark.  Or playing the Game of Life.  Little did I know that Summers for the rest of my life would never be the same.

Long, lost summer.

It's a slow process from child to adult and summer gets lost along the way with tricycles and stuffed animals and Nancy Drew mystery books.  We all go through it.  We go to work.  We have children.  We watch them play all summer as we fold the laundry and make sandwiches.  I loved watching my children play make believe in the backyard.  I helped them make pirate ships and castles to sail away to their very own wonderlands in the clouds of imagination.

Now, I want mine back.  But is it even possible?

As I sit on the window seat feeling the fresh, sweet breeze I'm curious.  And I wonder, why can't I have my summer back? Why not be a modern day, female Peter Pan?  Travel the world in my imagination where I am captain of my own ship.  Where is Tinkerbell when you need her?

Poof. 

I am captain of my own ship.  Yes, I am.  I walk in the woods everyday in my own neighborhood.  I still read book after book, usually at night.  Instead of embroidery, I throw and paint clay.  And every night, I sit on the window seat and watch the sun go down eagerly awaiting the time when the sky turns Maxfield Parrish blue with rose silhouetting the hills and trees in the distance.   

Think happy thoughts.

My summer isn't lost after all.  I can sit on the window seat and read and sip ice tea and look at the clouds and dream. Maybe what I need to remember is not my childhood summers but Summer's now.  And how easy it really is to just sit and be.

Happy Thoughts.  That's all it takes, doesn't it? And, maybe a little help from Tinkerbell.