The Serendipity

Some people love to live on the wild side but I'll admit it. I've always liked the idea of happily ever after. A little cottage in the woods surrounded by flowers. A happy woodcutter with a good wife who bakes bread while he stockpiles logs and they both rear two apple cheeked children, a boy and a girl.

Both children have bright blue eyes and white blonde hair. They help their mother with the chores around the house and every night the family sits down to dinner to sip their healthy vegetable soup and eat their homemade brown bread while the crickets begin to chirp and the moon rises over the lake.

After dinner, mother opens the cupboard doors that hide two cozy little beds and turns down their eiderdown comforters before tucking them in. The children sing a beautiful duet of, "When at night I go to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep."

Both parents kiss their sweet little foreheads and go off to sit in front of the fire where the mother quietly knits warm woolen stockings and the father smokes his pipe in absolute contentment. As the fire dies down, both parents climb into their own bed and go fast asleep, snuggled up in each others arms.

And after 365 days of this they all dream of a day when a little adventure will fall into their lives and relieve what has become unbearable monotony!

Of course life is seldom such smooth sailing, but I do notice that without a little angst in mine I have trouble writing.

On the other hand, I suffer from Goldilocks Syndrome. When life is way too soft I sink into it and am unable to write at all. If the angst is way too hard, it consumes me, also leaving me with no energy to write with. I need it just right!

Like a child I love to dread. I dream of meeting the wolf in the woods and recognizing that something is not quite right. I love putting two and two together, remembering that some wolfly creature was heard blowing down houses and when Grandma looks a little peaked I can be the hero who figures out she has been replaced by a shape-shifter and I am the one who rescues her from the dark closet!

And if I am not dreading, I love to want! The thought of discovering a house filled with toys of every sort is so delicious! But I don't really want it to last forever. It is the wanting and the dreaming that makes me drool with anticipation! Waiting for Santa to slide down the chimney with some long dreamed of object. Gobbling up the story that my favorite author took three years to write. Looking forward to meeting someone I've dreamed of meeting.

There is such richness in imagination, but mine must be fed a starvation diet of living a little along the edge, or like a dark Tinkerbell, it begins to die. Too much of anything, even peace and harmony dulls my senses, either burying me alive or allowing me to take life for granted.