Village

Small-town USA
Photo by DramaticElegance 

Just a small town girl
Livin' in a lonely world
She took the midnight train
Goin' anywhere ~Don't Stop Believing, Journey


All of my life, I have been a small-town girl. 


While my heart is a little more big-city style...


...while I always complained throughout my entire teen years about how I can't wait to "get out of this town,"...


...how I spent summer upon summer planning my star-studded future in Chicago or NYC...


...my heart is melted here now. 


Tonight while my husband was at work, my mummy, daddy, and I piled into my parents' Jeep...


...complete with pillows, popcorn buckets, reclining armchairs, and fluffy blankets...


...and headed to downtown movie night!


Honestly, there is nothing better than Tangled to the tune of fireflies...complete with rather awful small-town guitar music, and right up next to the local ice cream parlour where white-chocolate-raspberry-fudge waffle cones await. 


This is the town I grew up in, the town in which I do theater.


This is a town so sweet and small that the police shut down an entire street for the locals to fill with lawn chairs and blankets, and the bank supplies steaming hot popcorn without a single cent in exchange. 


Spending the evening with my parents...

My amazing and wonderfully still-in-love parents
Photo by DramaticElegance

...laughing at the antics of my sugar-hyper daddy, recording snippets of video pre-movie for my sister overseas, and snuggling under blankets with my mummy while my daddy chats up almost everyone in town...


...that's a place I love to be. 


Small town girl. 


Big city dreams.


Here the two meet, 


and they meet well.

Just smell the grass! The dirt! Just like I dreamed they'd be! / Just feel that summer breeze - the way it's calling me / For like the first time ever, I'm completely free! / I could go running / And racing / And dancing / And chasing / And leaping / And bounding / Hair flying / Heart pounding / And splashing / And reeling / And finally feeling / Now's when my life begins! ~When My Life Begins, Tangled

(Also, speaking of adorable villages, Carlotta at Pastor's Girl's Ponderings is having an adorable Parisan giveaway! It ends tomorrow, so be sure to check it out and enter soon!)

Las Gotas de Lluvia (Drops of Rain)

Don't you fret, M'sieur Marius / I don't feel any pain / A little fall of rain / Can hardly hurt me now / You're here, that's all I need to know / And you will keep me safe / And you will keep me close / And rain / will make the flowers grow. ~Les Miserables, Little Fall of Rain

It's raining.

Again.

While I can't say that I don't love the soft kiss of rain on my face or on the pattering of moisture on my windowpane...

...I'm starting to be a bit fed up with all this rain.

The weather has been nothing but unusual in this part of the world...raining one moment, beautiful blue sky the next.

I think it's feeling as off-kilter and strange as I myself have felt recently.

One minute, my skies are grey...broken...tears flowing as steady as Midwestern rain.

The next, the clouds break and my soul is flooded with a strange sort of joy, as though the windshield wipers of my heart have been turned on, and my vision clears again.

It's odd, to be sure.

Maybe I should go to Narnia, as I've always planned...

...and ask Aslan to turn me into a nyad or a dryad, one of the tree or water nymphs.

It might be a nice change...

...to weave my hair with rose petals and ivy vines...

...or to wear water droplets like nature's diamonds about my neck...

...to clad myself in a gown of clouds...

...to wander barefoot through the softest grass that merges with my soul.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain about the weather so much.

Maybe I need to just embrace it.

Love it.

Wear it.

Take it into my soul and breathe it into my lungs.

I think I shall leap into puddles,

and make a necklace out of raindrops.

The best kind of rain, of course, is a cozy rain. This is the kind the anonymous medieval poet makes me remember, the rain that falls on a day when you'd just as soon stay in bed a little longer, write letters or read a good book by the fire, take early tea with hot scones and jam and look out the streaked window with complacency. ~Susan Allen Toth