Archive for March, 2009

The smell of iced tea always brings me back to simpler times. I don’t always notice it, but it’s a powerful thing. One whiff of Lipton’s lemon iced tea, and I’m ten years old again, sitting on my grandparents’ porch sipping iced tea out of a little red and white frosted glass.

I wish I remembered more of that time. I took it for granted like most kids do, and I spent the whole time just wanting to be grown up and do grown up things. Now that I’m most of the way there, I want to be a kid again and stop doing grown up things. I want to go back to playing on the swing set that no longer stands in our back yard, to crawling around on my hands and knees with my sisters pretending that we’re dogs or cats or wolves or our beloved wolffoxes. I want to dig up worms in the sandbox and ride my bike up and down the hill pretending that it’s Black Beauty or Ginger. I want to sword fight under the pine tree with wooden swords until my hands hurt too much to hold the hilt. I want to pretend I’m the renegade princess saving the prince in distress.

I think, most of all, I want to go back to when things weren’t complicated, back when there was no such thing as the popular girls, and everybody was friends with everybody else. I want to go back to when we begged our mothers to let us ride our bikes to school instead of begging for more time on the computer. I want it to be okay to play pretend again, to make believe myself a whole new world where everything is different. I want to be able to see that world unfolding before my eyes with the imagination of a child.

There is no better reason than that for why I ache to write. It’s not even a want, not a desire, but a necessity. That little girl with the messed up front teeth, bright blonde hair down to her butt, and huge glasses is still there inside of me, deep down somewhere beneath the stigma of the cliques, the wrong crowd, the failures, and the student loans, and she still throws a tantrum when I don’t let her out to play.

But honestly, I couldn’t ask for anything better. Where so much of my generation has lost the plot and spends their free time partying, drinking, doing drugs and making bad choices, I’m here in front of this blank page or blank computer screen reliving my childhood and remembering when times were good. (Of course, that’s not to say I haven’t made my fair share of bad choices. Just look at high school. That was one big three-and-a-half year bad choice.)

I don’t really know quite what sparked this. Maybe it was the first truly warm nice day of the year, or the carefree puppies playing around my feet, or the kids riding their bikes down my street. Or maybe, it was the cup of Lipton’s lemon iced tea.