Valley Dreams

I had no trouble playing by myself when I was younger. Having two older sisters, so different in age, it was normal for me to play on my own. This was when I began to use my imagination. I liked to pretend and makeup scenarios of living elsewhere and being someone completely different than I was.

There were times I would pretend I was living in a city, far away from Cherry Valley. I used to read books set in a hot and busy New York city. I pretended I lived in a high skyscraper building and had to catch the subway to get to school. Something about a landscape different than the one I was raised in fascinated me. Why is it we are always intrigued by something we can’t or don’t have?

There were times when I would play out by the creek behind our house. I would pretend my family was rich, and our white farmhouse was a white mansion. I would look back at my house, half a mile away, and pretend I was running away from home. That I didn’t want to live such a frivolous life among the riches anymore. That my parents were forcing me to be someone I didn’t want to be.  Arrange my marriage and make me grow up prime and proper.  The complete opposite scenario of how my life actually was.  I loved using my imagination.  It kept me busy and occupied.  Something I needed with no busy streets or internet or friends right down the street. The only person I had to keep me busy, was me.

It was my imagination and creating different stories and scenarios in my head that made me into a dreamer. My parents never told me I couldn’t use my imagination or daydream up stories, so I never had a wall standing in front of me of what I could or couldn’t do. I had the open fields and the horizon stretching far before me. I had the whole valley for my dreams to be created and come true.

It was the vastness of the valley that allowed me to dream, to think of where I really wanted to go some day. What I really wanted to be. It was the valley, that all along, told me I was going to travel far beyond that horizon line.  That this land was only my staging grounds. My launching off point for traveling some place greater and dreaming of something bigger, than I ever knew my mind or body had the capacity for. The valley was where I strung my dreams together, little by little and piece by piece.