When I was a little girl, very elementary school aged, we spent the summers at our summer home in the
Town of Erin (that home eventually became a permanent one).
With four small children underfoot during those long hot summer days, my mother, to save her sanity, instituted "Quiet Time". If you were of napping age, well, that is self-explanatory. Those in between napping age (at either end of the spectrum) were instructed to find something quiet and stationary to do for a minimum of one hour and leave my mother in peace.
Various acceptable activities included reading, hand sewingdolls clothes, playing very quietly in one of the numerous tree forts that occupied different sectors of our 65 acres, or just lying in the fields of tall wild grass inside the small clearings of the evergreen forest hand planted by my family, his family (including me) and friends who came to visit in the early years before the big house was built. In fact, day-dreaming the afternoons away while staring at the clouds and imagining what they looked like, was a very acceptable pastime on those long summer holidays.
And so it was one evening last week I found my self alone, sans the G-man and both DD's, unexpectedly for several hours, between work and a late supper. For 4 hours I blissfully knit and read on my front proch while the sun, so infrequent of late, streamed brigfhtly on the porch where I sat. At one point there was not a sound, no cars, no neighborhood children, no barking dogs, just the sound of little birds in my cedar hedge going about their daily business.
And so it was, as I sat on my porch and knit and knit and knit, that I recalled those "Quiet Times" of my childhood, and wished with all my might that I could go back and re-institute those mandatory periods of peace, those moments of day-dreaming freedom into everyday life. I think we would all be better off for it.
Knit on..........
