Flights of Fancy

In glittering summer twilights, flickering lightening bugs enchanted me. Their blinking, glowing forms peeped through darkened bushes. A delicate flash, and then gone. My brother and I would catch them in mason jars, rising up on tippy toes to catch the ones that fluttered high and far. Mom poked holes in the tops of our jars, and we'd watch for a few minutes--the jars like organic lanterns, pulsing with greenish light as we gambolled about the yard--before we set the bugs free. As a child, my favorite books and movies and fantasies were about unicorns and fairies and wizards and monsters and witches. They still are. I'm bewitched by that place that we all go to, where enchantment meets reality, where the lines blur and things that can't be real become more real than the things we've known all along. Perhaps I am tempted further and longer than others my age by magic, by the inbetween. I should have shrugged all this off long ago, eschewing fantasy for practicality. But I can't; and I don't want to. My head is often full of candy floss and dreams and imaginings. I'm fascinated by the other side, either dark and grim and full of teeth or spangled with glitter and fairy wings. It's an escape, but it's also an embrace. I embrace what might be just outside of sight, just beyond reach, where you have to go up on tippy toe. {My entry for Blogging4Books.}