Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved playing outside. She delighted in the flowers, in the wet morning grass, in the warmth of the sun playing hide and seek through the trees. She compared rocks and arranged sticks and sniffed every plant in her path. The breeze and the birds and the toads and the squirrels were her playmates. She woke up every day filled with a bubbling anticipation, flinging back the blue and white checked covers on her little single bed tucked in the corner of the little room tucked into the corner of the little red house. She would sing as she pulled on her play clothes, skip down the short hall to the kitchen, make quick work of the breakfast her mother would have waiting for her, and fling open the front door ready for the adventure of the day to begin.
One day, as mothers do, her mother handed her a sentence, and she tucked it into the little basket in her brain. And then the TV handed her another sentence. And the friends in the neighborhood shared the sentences they were carrying around in their brains. And then school started piling her full of paragraphs and chapters and her head got so full it was hard to hold it up. The effort of holding up that head made the adventure of the day a challenge. It was so tiring to peer through all the words in her head, hard to see the shape of a dog in a passing wisp of cloud, for instance.
The world spun past her, for many years. The yellow in the center of a daisy bloomed and faded without her awareness. The hummingbird hovered and dipped and lived and died without her following his path for even a second. The green leaves turned yellow then brown and fell and were replaced by new green leaves which themselves turned yellow then brown and fell all without her knowing.
Well, that part isn’t exactly true. Some part of her knew. Some part of her felt the growing and the blooming and the fading. Some part of her sensed the seasons rise and fall. A faint song played from her heart, threading its way through the dense tangle of ‘shoulds’ and ‘must do’s’ filling her head, a muffled pulse in the background, reminding her of the world she so loved but had mostly forgotten.
And then came a day when some of the words in her head started to fall out. And then some more. And then a day when she noticed that it was easier to carry her head around without so much in it, so she started tossing words and then sentences and then paragraphs.
And the people around her stared in suspicion. Who was she to laugh so easily? Who was she to not answer her phone? Who was she to leave a bed unmade? Who was she to leave a party right after she got there?
Someone called her a witch and she cocked her head to the side, considering. “Maybe,” she said.
Someone called her selfish and she nodded. “Definitely,” she said.
Someone wondered if she might be losing her memory. “I hope so,” she said.
Someone called her a Buddhist. “Could be,” she said.
“You missed your appointment,” someone pointed out. “Whoops,” she said. “I had to see if the squirrels would get that bird feeder down.”
She waited for the obvious question but the person didn’t ask it.
She answered anyway. “Those rascals did it! Had a real feast.”
“There’s a way to prevent that,” the person said.
“Why would I prevent something so entertaining?” she said, wide eyed and laughing.
Someone commented that she might be obsolescent. “Big word,” she said. “I think I threw that one out.” She looked at the commenter, kindness and light shining from eyes as clear as a cloudless sky. “I must not have needed it anymore.”
Contact me at: lynn@lynnrankinesquer.com
Visit me at my FB author page: Lynn Rankin-Esquer Author
Follow me on Twitter at @LRankinEsquer
website: https://lynnrankin-esquer.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/momgoddess8/
Threads: https://lynnresquer_threads.net
Post: https://post.news/@/lynnresquer
Spoutible: https://spoutible.com/LynnRankinEsquer
lynn rankin-esquer 