When I was a kid I had visions of unicorns and rainbows and swimming with the manta rays.
When I dreamed it was of pencil sets in a thousand different colors, of feathered gowns and sequined capes and festooned headdresses.
When I walked through my days it was largely in imagination and make-believe. I held out hope that I might stumble into a hole in the forest floor and uncover a secret world of magic and monsters, tempered by beauty and fields of flowers and nearby rolling streams, all with a castle in the distance that would be warmed by fireplaces at night. When the ocean lapped at my feet on family vacations, I pictured myself holding onto the dorsal fin of a dolphin and flying through their salty environs, or barely caressing the soft slime coating the ribbon of a moray eel. These were the images I entertained in a childhood marked by wild imaginings. I much preferred the fantastical lands I could conjure in my mind than the mundane sidewalks of Amsterdam, New York.
I also had a wish to walk through a cloud before I knew what they were, thinking the thick smoke was almost solid, in which I could play hide-and-seek with friends. Then I got in a plane and flew through the clouds and they parted and dissipated and vanished into thin air.
Every once in a while, however, I’ll catch a glimpse of fog in a little valley ahead of me, and it calls to the imagination of my childhood, where anything was possible, and spells and enchantments could be cast and caught, and a pool of morning mist beckoned with the notion of what-if…
