jules65's Journal

tomorrow could be anything you wanted.....

what would you want for yourself?

If you had to pick one period in your life that represents your best you or most gives you that feeling of full and total happiness and completeness when would it be?  Perhaps you havent gotten there yet.  Maybe it is a place in your mind that you have yet to create for yourself.

For me it was the summer I was ten years old.

If I close my eyes I can see the girl I was.  Long, long hair down nearly to my waist.  A little on the chubby side but that was okay becuase my mom still had me convinced that it was baby fat and that one day it would miraculously disappear.  I'm wearing turquoise shorts and one of those stretchy tube tops all the girls used to wear that is white with a little turquoise on the edges.  My skin is wonderfully tanned from playing outside and my feet make that wonderful flip flop sound as I run.

At this point in my life my family would not be any more perfect than it is.  Life could not possibly be any more magical than it is at that moment in time in my life.  Even today all these years later I can close my eyes and see the world through the eyes of that ten year old,  I can smell the wonderful dinners my mom used to cook and hear the crickets singing me to sleep through open windows on warm summer nights that leave me looking up at the stars through white polka dotted sheers in my bedroom window.  What a world it is.  There is nothing more important than spending every day with my brother Scott and our friends searching for our next adventure or place to build our next fort.

We spend afternoons crawling thru the weeds hiding our G-I- Joes and setting up all the gear that went with them after eating lunches of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sour creme and onion chips washed down with icy cold cherry cool aid.  To this day I don't think there is any lunch that can compare to that. 

The world is full of potential and promise and I haven't yet learned that growing up will bring me self doubt and a constant nagging fear of failure and imperfection.  I don't yet know that this is the most important time of my life......this one......the one I'm living right now......that while it seems to wonderful, also feels so ordinary.  I have no idea that a forever of years will pass and I will remember this time with a longing that fuels my soul.

It is a spectacular time in my life.....the best summer I ever had......I look at my children from the time they were born and I have always told them "You are so magical."  I guess what I am saying is that you are an open book just waiting to be written....a clean slate that hasn't been soiled by the weariness in the world....a grab bag of limitless possibilities.  Of course, they look at me like I am nuts....and why not?  But that summer, the one when I was ten.....it was my summer of being magical.

It's funny.......I have always had a curiosity about the elderly and how they relive old times over and over and over again, and here I am, not even to the age yet that I consider old (the lines are beginning to blur a bit) and there are days when in my mind I very nearly live in the past.......go figure.