Daydreaming

While I’m off preparing for my major event at work and trying not to have a nervous breakdown, I’ve called in the cavalry to keep you entertained.  Today’s guest blogger is my e-friend Jessica who blogs at Days Go By.

~

I don’t know how long I’ve been reading Jen’s posts – I went back over the archives and realized I’ve read them all (probably on one of my insomnia nights) and so I can’t be more precise than to say that I’ve been reading her forever. I was incredibly honoured when she asked if I would consider doing a guest spot here in Jenworld.

While I was in university, I spent those long (long, eternally looong) days I sat in Statistics class supposedly working on something or other dreadfully important. Instead I was busy deciding what sort of house I’d have and what kind of life I was going to take on as soon as I was through the eternal fire and damnation of these classes.

I was going to be a busy woman (Well, I’d damned well better be, after all this schooling.) with an incredible career.  I was going to have a clever, handsome husband who would love me unreservedly while making me laugh and pushing me to be the best I could be. The kind of person who would shake his head and roll his eyes at my foibles, and then quip back.

We would have children – two, possibly three. Probably girls so I could pass on all the books I’d loved as a child — we’d be a reading family, you see. They would be tall and long-legged and graceful and … well, elegant, full of spice and fun and an incurable love for both pretzeling up with a good book and playing baseball. Their long legs would be coltish and eager to run, rounding bases with ease.

Our home would be full of beautiful things -– one-of-a-kind things, distinctive things that we would all love. We’d be the kind of household that wouldn’t buy a sofa without all of us loving it –- we’d be the kind of household that would rather sit on the floor than have a piece of furniture that wasn’t exactly what we wanted. We would have a garden full of tall flowers and young trees, and a long, green lawn.

In the evenings we would sit near the fire and laugh or watch the news or just sit and be silent together, working on our own projects.

It was a lovely dream, one that I fleshed out over the better part of two semesters. Soon university was over, and my life -– my real life, not the one I’d imagined, but my real, different-but-oddly-wonderful life with kids and a loving husband and fruit trees of my own came into being, and I’ve very happily been living it for some years now.

But when I need a clever-woman escape? One that fulfills many of the things I thought were certain to happen way back in that grotty old classroom with the dust motes winking in the long ribbons of sunlight coming in the windows?

I can just come read Jen for awhile. You can too.