Preview of Imagination

She has worked since she was seventeen. And now she is forty-nine, edging eerily close to fifty...half a century old, five decades living for work and working to live.

Her forty-nine-year-old back stopped cooperating with her twenty-five-year-old brain this year and protested every move, every moment seated, every moment laying down, every moment walking, so in a desperate move she saw a doctor, took some medication, begged off work for five full days, this time not to travel to Venice Beach, California, or Dallas, Texas, or Albuquerque or Boston or Newport, Rhode Island, but to do the one thing she has dreaded, to rest.

The very thought that she was needing to relax, not fight airports and delays and smart-ass taxi drivers, frightened her a little. By day five, though, she had become content to be home, happy with herself, comfortable.

There was the usual self-examination day when she used her chair-side psychoanalysis techniques on herself to discover where her center was. There was the day she reconciled being nearly fifty. There was the day she learned she was really okay; no, more than okay; that she was just fine. And finally, after all that psychobabble was over, the sleep caught up on and her back better, she rediscovered her imagination.

This morning she ventured outside early. Her iced coffee was rich and thick and strong as she sipped it. The sun was filtering through the leaves of the big old tree in her back yard, making broken glass-like patterns in the thick grass and ground cover. She sat at her picnic table awhile and finished her coffee, rubbing sleep from her eyes. The next few moments were ticked off by wandering around, picking up twigs and limbs that littered the yard, a product of the storm that rumbled through the night before.

The next few moments she squatted in the grass to hunt for four-leafed clovers, a pleasure her mother taught her many years prior, one that she had given up for her nine-to-five, for raising her two children alone, for hiding out from any number of evils and demons chasing her down.
In the next few minutes, the girl understood she was finally a woman and that the demons had thankfully been put to rest. It only took forty-nine years to learn that lesson.

The next few moments turned into two hours, and she knew then that time meant nothing.

She stood up, brushed the dirt from her hands. It was an amazing morning of realizations and calmness and letting go and grabbing on. Imagine her surprise when she realized that all along her center had been in her own back yard and she simply needed to take the moment to find it.