I usually enjoy reading this site because it is a refuge from the endless political banter that is blasted from every media outlet. I think that voting and politics are very important parts of being an American but when we overly criticize every word or gesture made by a candidate it debases our system. Please keep these type of posts to a minimum!!!!!!
One summer many years ago when my twin sister and I were very young, we discovered a magnificent swinging vine in the woods behind our house. We constructed a fort to protect our vine, although it wasn’t much more than an old white blanket and some branches propped up against a tree, we thought it was the most magical place in existence. But the vine made the fort, the vine was the fort, without the vine there would be no fort at all. We felt a deep attraction to the woods; it was a force that seemed to pull us out of our beds each morning and drag us across the lawn and down the dirt path. We spent every waking moment of that summer in our fort and flying over the hill on our vine, the wind in out hair and not a care in the world. Years later, I still remember that moment and all of the promises the discovery of the vine held – promises of summer, of excitement, of flying, and of sisterhood. For that one summer I was surrounded by youth and innocence. But life taught me that eternal summers never last forever. Late August came and so did the high school boys from up the street. The boys caught sight of the vine and there was no stopping them, they were too heavy and the vine snapped sending the magic of that summer crashing down the hill. When we left the woods that day, we left for good. I know I can never go back; I am different now, and thus the place has changed as well. I would be a stranger, trespassing in a strange wood. The Vine was more than just a game to us. It was a freedom, something to call our own; but most of all, it was magic. It was the magic of the imagination that only children can experience. It was our eternal summer, and, for a brief two months, time could not enter.