Summer Afternoon.

There are times when you feel like you know yourself better than you know how to breathe. And then there are times when you hardly recognize who you see in the mirror. It usually happens slowly. Until one night you're laying in bed trying not to sleep and your thoughts don't seem to be your own. There's a stranger in your head.

You decide you need to put the books away for a while and to stop watching television late at night. Maybe. You wonder at what point you switched from worrying about yourself to worrying about the children. You miss them.

Your favorite moments are spent on the dock with the dog, the smell of coconut, and the sounds of laughter and splashing and the steady pounding of a boat. Or those late nights when you refuse to surrender to sleep as you steal upstairs and quietly reacquaint yourself with Mozart and Handel and Chopin. And in their presence, you're aware only of you and the music and what it does in your soul.

For the first time in your memory, your calendar is empty. You avoid your phone and clock and makeup bag. You spend every hour you can in the sun. Your laundry consists of swimsuits and dresses and towels. You're finding freckles you've never noticed. You eat peanut butter sandwiches and drink red drinks and wear your hair in pony tails.

You have projects scattered all over the place. Colored pencils and notebooks and novels and letters to mail. Seeing it all makes you happier inside. You're learning a new song, drawing from a different angle, finding new authors.

It's summer and it's glorious. Next summer you're already scheming of leaving the country and finding some good to do. But this summer you're getting familiar with life again. You're figuring out what time is. Discovering the world around you.

"Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language."
-Henry James