Reverie

Sunday afternoon I lay in bed after a rare and wonderful nap.  Swedish foam and down comforter on a wintery day are an amazing combination. I think I could have laid there till the next morning…

I stared up at the ceiling trying to decipher shapes and faces out of the dimple dots above me as my mind was wandering around the world and back.

I was feeling so reflective, pausing to remember in detail our home in Africa. I was walking through our apartment laying my mind’s eye and my thoughts on various details that I love. That I miss. And I was fondly thinking of our friends there. I miss them too.

Enough time has passed that our life there has largely become idealistic in my head. I think this happens naturally when you are separated from a place or person for a significant amount of time. However, I’m smart enough to know that life there wasn’t perfect and that it comes with a heap of ‘character-building’ experiences, DAILY.

But I still miss my white tile countertop and my santuko knife. And the local market. And my gas stove.  And I really, really miss my friends. For a short time that afternoon, I felt like I was back there again. It was nice.

“The gift of reverie is a blessing divine, and it is conferred most abundantly on those who lie in hammocks or drive alone in cars. Or lean on hillside fences in Kentucky. The mind swims, binding itself to whatever flotsam comes along, to old driftwood faces and voices of the past, to places and scenes once visited, to things not seen or done but only dreamed.”

William Nack wrote those prose in his article “Pure Heart” about Secretariat in Sports Illustrated. I read the book last year and read his article soon after. This paragraph struck me as some beautifully crafted sentences and I wrote them down and have read them many times since then. 

If you ask me, reverie is also conferred on those who snuggle in a warm bed on a frigid Sunday afternoon. And it was a blessing divine.