Still Life With A Small Town Girl

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The Prompt: Sparkling or Still—What’s your idea of a perfect day off: one during which you can quietly relax, doing nothing, or one with one fun activity lined up after the other? Tell us how you’d spend your time.

Still Life With A Small Town Girl

For many years when I was small and far into my teens,
my summer days were filled with little else than magazines
and books and all the other things a girl in a small town
brings into her summers just to make the days less brown.

Day after day of reading soon led to dreaming, and
my shade beneath the cherry tree became a foreign land.
I did not know the name of it, but in this foreign place
the people did such lovely things. They kept a faster pace.

There were many things to see and people who liked doing—
circuses and carnivals, badminton and horse-shoeing,
imaginings and plays and travels. People who liked dancing.
Instead of trudging down the street, these people would be prancing.

I dreamed such dreams of bigger towns, and far-away towns, too.
All summer, I lay in the grass, dreaming what I’d do
when I was so much older and could go out on my own.
I’d wander off into the world. Explore the great unknown.

Now six decades later, I have done it all—
so many of those things I yearned to do when I was small.
I’ve been to places far and wide—Africa and Peru.
In England, France, Australia—I found so much to do.

Plays and concerts, dances, films, museums, garden walks.
Lectures, movies, workshops, classes, roundtables and talks.
Tours and treks and trips and sorties—guided meditations.
Somehow life seemed fuller packed with exotic vacations.

But now that I am sixty-seven, I’d appreciate
if all this activity would finally abate.
I dream of slower days that I’d spend dreaming in the shade
where all my memories of days spent doing would just fade

into the past and leave me to dream here in this place,
swinging in my hammock, at a slower pace.
Leaving my activity to stream from head to pen.
Filling up the page with all the places I have been.

And making some sense out of why I had to go and go,
speeding up the days that back then seemed to me so slow.
I guess I had to travel to find others of my kind
to teach me that life’s riches are mainly in the mind!

20 thoughts on “Still Life With A Small Town Girl”

  2. Tamara's avatarTamara

    You would not be who you are today if you had not been all those places and seen all those things! Staying a small town person makes for a narrow mind. You have all that richness to draw on when you write or create. I have not traveled enough yet, though all these exotic places in mind beckon me.

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  4. alphabetstory's avataralphabetstory

    I have similar memories of being young and dreaming and then growing on in years and remembering all the things and places that have given me such wonderful memories. thanks for helping me remember.

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  5. Pingback: Good Times Just Don’t Pass Away | lifelessons – a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown

  6. Anton Wills-Eve's avatarAnton Wills-Eve

    Dear Judy. You know a lot about the life I’ve led and that I have worked all over the world in times and places good and bad . But the two things that stand out for me in your poem are the last line, all my riches are in my mind, and your current contentment at having seen the fairyland of your dreams for real and love just writing about it. But unlike you I can’t stand being too ill not to carry on travelling and visit again several places where I was really happy. The difference between us is that I never dreamed about them before I visited them so the glorious revelations of places like Tuscany, Paris, India, the upper reaches of the Mekong, the Amazon and the Nile were all fairyland for the first time. How I’d love to go back to so many. My adorable wife says I’m too nostalgic, but, without my love of my children plus what I’ve seen and done, and many people I have known and loved, both humanly and spiritually I’d have so very little left to write or say. And that really would finish me off. 🙂

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    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      Anton, I’ve found that every place I’ve visited again after a long delay has changed so much that it really dissipates the memories of my first or second visit to see the modernization and other changes, so perhaps it is better to revisit them only in memory and if we do travel, to travel to new places instead where we have nothing invested and no memories to live up to. I can’t believe you’ve told every story. When we’ve covered the surface of our lives, then we must just dig deeper, because there really is enough content in our lives to last us a lifetime. Someone once said that to survive adolescence gives us enough material for the rest of our lives. I think prompts do this. It’s like furnishing a dart to throw into the dartboard of our existence to randomly pick a point to write about. It’s all there. We just need help in choosing. When I went to your post for Jennifer’s new prompt finder, there was nothing posted. You can send a pingback to her regular website and she’ll post it for you. And keep digging. Maybe you want to tell some of the stories you’ve told me to a wider audience. They were fascinating.

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  7. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

    I too found the places I visited to be magical and nothing at all as I had imagined they would be. The dreaming I did was more wishing for a wider experience than actually researching what places would be like. I thought Africa would be like the Tarzan books. It wasn’t, but it was even better populated by real people. I have actually been disappointed by Paris the two times I’ve been there–mainly because in spite of the wonderful art, the friendliness I’ve found everywhere else on earth was just lacking. I know people love Paris. It just happens not to be my sort of place. I felt more alien there than I did in any part of Africa or Indonesia or Sri Lanka or the wildest parts of Timor.

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    1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

      Thanks so much for validating my memories, Mary. Guess we do that for each other. It makes them less flights of fancy and a bit more reality. I love the one (among many) of yours about your mom driving away with a man in the trunk. That would make a great TV episode! Perhaps that is the next step: Murdo, the TV Serial!

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        1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

          Ha… But where does Connie come into the picture? I’m addicted to your blog. Such a treat to see a Murdo girl waiting there for me in my Reader.

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            1. lifelessons's avatarlifelessons Post author

              That is what is so great about blogs. When the internet first started, I tried entering some of the chat rooms, but some were so insipid and others so negative that I backed away fast. I’ve found blogging to be such a positive and mind-expanding thing. Easy just to get lost in it. And it was such a pleasure to find someone from my home town equally ensconced in it. I thank my sister Patti for discovering you. I don’t know how. I’ll have to ask her. Was it through Billy?

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