Summer Dreaming

   I'm tired.  I'm drinking hot chocolate (with a wee bit of coffee mixed in) and eating a blueberry muffin (a little overdone.)  Anyway, I'm super tired.  And I'm done with all this cold weather.  Today I was remembering what it was like to be tan....we white girls have a hard lot--especially those of us that look like a mix between Snow White and a Vampire.  But enough complaining.

   So I've been oddly nostalgic lately.  Remembering things I've done, people I've loved, choices I've made, and the way I've acted.  Life is a funny thing.  I think I must echo Zossima and say that one must love everything and do all things out of love.

   I'm in a scenic design class.  It's extremely interesting.  I'm fascinated.  I want to know more about scenography.  I want to be really good at it.

   It's at times like this--at the low point of the winter--that I long so much for the warmth of sunshine and to walk barefooted through the grass and to splash in the crisp water of the ocean as the waves roll in and to listen to warm summer songs and to fully embrace my hippie desire to pack all my belongings into a trailer and travel all over.  I start to slip away from reality and live in an imaginary world where I can wear short cut-off jeans and a baggy tank top and long board all over and read in the sand and not fatten myself up in an attempt to stay warm by adding a thick layer of blubber all over my body.  Do we even remember what summer was like?  Us who live here, lost in the barrens of the North Shore--do we remember a clear, sunny sky, heat that radiating off the sidewalk?  Do we girls who pile on the pounds and the layers to keep warm remember shaved legs covered only by a thin sundress?  Do we remember the feel of shoes without socks and tan skin, kissed by the heat?  Do we remember just how lovely summer is?  I feel like I can go there in my mind....but the more I do, the more I find it hard to get through all this ice and wind and cold.  I want to travel through time and through my imagination to a place where it's deliciously warm.  Only 3 more months to go.....