It's never too late.

And I mean flushed in the non-bathroom sort of way

Weighing my pockets with stones of longing

Especially when those days are Saturday and Sunday.

They always come crawling back

My roommates are back in Myers watching movies that I like. I gave Theo 3 pounds of peachy penguins tonight for Valentine's Day and he had to make himself stop eating them. I wish I were little again and playing by myself in my backyard. Here's how it would go.

It would be late spring, early summer. I would wake up in my corner room, and it would be all yellow. The curtains would be billowing a little bit like bubble clouds even though I didn't remember the window was open until a breeze came through that one part of the corner and brushed across my cheek and I'd inhale and say, "ah it smells like spring" in my head. and I would turn around until the sheets were tangled and uncomfortable so i could look at my stuffed animals, my clock, maybe turn on my radio with the pink play button. I could hear Mr. Gasman outside the North window working on his fishing boat.

I get up and the wood floor is cold and dusty but my stuff is everywhere making it warm. On my desk I have a notebook with large writing about secret things that I hide in the tree with me while I try to glue things together with the milk from the leaf stems. It's a maple tree and it's beautifully green and the bark is rough and soft.

I don't know what I'm wearing because I'm not old and silly enough to pay attention to my clothes. They just hang around and watch me do things, like they don't have anything better to do.

I would go through the dining room to get to the kitchen because the living room is too open for this early in the morning. It would make it seem like afternoon, and like time was moving without me. In the dining room fuzzy is sleeping on the chair and I pet her until I get her to move (she jumps up onto the table and lays back down) so I can feel where the chair is warm where she used to be sleeping. That is one of my favorite feelings. In the night, she'll be sleeping on the table while mom is balancing her checkbook with all those stacks of typed envelopes rubberbanded together and a calculator and her pen. And mom will shove fuzzy off the table (she'll lay down on a chair) because she's too close to the rubberbanded piles so they fall down. And when fuzzy has moved, I'll lay my head down so my cheek is on that spot on the table where it's all warm, and my arm will knock over a pile of rubberbanded envelopes but mom won't shove me away. she'll pet my head and say, "Looks like you're ready for bed, Monkey." But I'll say "No." because I really am only laying down so I can feel the warm spot but she won't believe me and I'll have to get up and go to bed where the floor boards are cold and I've forgotten that the window is open and I'll be scared when I hear the bushes moving and the curtains are shadowed, and my yellow room is not yellow in the dark. I'll twist around until the sheets are tangled and uncomfortable so I can grab a stuffed animal and pull it into bed with me. But hugging it makes it so I can't breathe because its fur is in my face, and I'll put it back because the other stuffed animals will be sad that they don't get to be in bed too and there's not enough room for all of them and then I'll be alone in bed and the sheets will still be tangled until I fall asleep and don't notice anymore.

I go in the kitchen and notice there are no cookies for me to sneak from the cookie jar. Mom is drinking iced tea on the porch. It smells like laundry and tea and wind. Fuzzy is in the sun, making a warm spot in the warm spot on the chair. I go through the porch out the screen door to the warm cement with the grill and to the grass with the baby trees that always grow when the seeds fall from the branches. I always wondered why we didn't have a million trees by the next year.

To be continued when I turn 8...

the sandbox revisited at 1:36 a.m.