I am sitting at my desk, writing my latest work in progress, with the window open and soft music playing through my computer. And suddenly, my mind flashed back to when I was a kid.
Perhaps it's the lawn mower I hear down the street, the faint humming of the motor transporting me back. Or maybe it's the chirps and twitters of the birds, or just the simple peacefulness. The entire house is quiet, my husband still not awake, and three of the four cats are in here cat-napping on the bed in this room.
The scene is very much a put-a-smile-on-your-face kind of scene.
Anyway, when I was a kid, weekends were reserved for my dad. My parents were divorced, so my brother and I would go to my dad's house. He owns 18 acres of wooded, rolling land, and as a kid, his land was a living force which provided hours of fantasy-filled adventures, mock hunting trips, and breathing example of science class. I saw garden spiders, snakes, praying mantis's laying their eggs. There were deer, wolves, coyotes, and cats. One of his neighbors even had a horse and turkeys. Gobble-gobble. He had a pond with fish, too, and we would take old bread and stand on the shore and feed the fish, watching them lurk below the surface before tentatively sucking down a floating bit of bread. And then I would catch grasshoppers and toss them into the pond, too. The grasshoppers could skim the top of the water. Sometimes, they made it back to shore, and sometimes the fish got them. We saw baby bunnies, possums, racoons, and squirrels. And spikes' nests in the rock driveway. Every spring, we would mark where the nest was and make sure to go around it so we didn't run over the eggs. And, even though I'm terrified of wasps, it was fascinating watching the mud daubers gather mud for their nests. Or bees gather pollen off of clover flowers.
In the winter, we would track bunnies through the snow. And in the summer, we would spend hours cutting the grass with push mowers before he finally invested in a couple of riding mowers. He also had a huge garden, and we would spend sweaty mornings pulling weeds while listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40 (tell me, you sang that in your head, didn't you?).
The radio was a staple in whatever we did at my dad's house. Or, as my dad called it, the radidio. I grew up on the Top 40. The radio was always on. We listened to the radio more than we watched TV.
Yes, this is what peaceful mornings like this do to me. They take me back to a time and place I never want to forget.
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