Flower Soup

I'm standing on the middle step of a little ladder that leads up to a slide. The whole swing set, including the slide are silver with diagonal streaks of dark blue. I now know that this play set was just a floor model. It was bought for the soul purpose of play and not to look pretty or anything. A nicer playground would have been a wooden one. But I always thought that this swing set was beautiful in its own way.

Anyway, back to the beginning of my story, I was stirring a soup, a very special soup indeed. The mixture was contained inside an old dark pink sand bucket. The bucket's white handle had broken off over time, and all one could see on the bucket were imprinted rings and two circles which the handles used to be attached to.

This mysterious mixture contained a number of odd ingredients: cold water from my pool, tons of green grass, red, orange, yellow, and pink rose pedals which I had found on the ground. Their perfume scent was deliciously deep, I might add. I stirred my soup regularly with a large metal spoon which I had stolen from the kitchen drawer.

The sky was a bright heaven I longed to fly into. I was all alone, and yet I didn't feel lonely at all. For there were important things which needed to be done. I had to feed my young children their dinner, which would soon spoil or get cold. Being a good mom was my ultimate task in life. I wanted to provide my kids with everything I could. But food was limited and so I stirred that soup until my arm was sour.

Half of me was content with my life, and the other part of me was weeping, weeping for a better life. I cried because no matter how hard I worked I lacked control over a world that can be dangerous if untamed. 18 years old, I am, I am, and adulthood isn't that far from my grasp. I see the world through new eyes, and yet I still haven't found the real me. My backyard is still there, of course. And I look outside my window surrounded by curtains of an antique white color, but I don't see the same thing as I did at seven years old. I see a large empty field where a pretty playground once stood. At present one can choose among 3 sophisticated park benches to sit in.

But I still miss that old swing set, because no matter how old I become, a small part of me will always be that little girl swinging on a blue plastic swing in a cool summer breeze.

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