We were bored. Barbies in the morning. Playing in the woods behind our home in the afternoon. Creating new recipes in between times. And then, we were bored.
“Why do we have to live here,” I said, “in the middle of nowhere. Where there’s nothing to do.”
In the boredom we learned. We daydreamed about future projects and created and found new ways to play.
The boredom lasted seconds. Minutes at most.
Mom would suggest cleaning. Washing dishes. We would always run, the wheels turning as we escaped her work.
It was summer, after all, we were on break. There is no room for work when we had days and days of play to do.
I give credit to my parents and maybe the small town I grew up in too. There weren’t camps and sports and summer school work to participate in. Reading was suggested. I imagine practicing math facts too. But outside of that, there really wasn’t a lot we had to do.
So we played. We created. We sipped lemonade from our lemonade stands. We picked raspberries from the bushes in our front yards and sold those too.
On weekends we rode our bikes to the gas station at the end of the road and bought all the candy our money could afford.
We collapsed onto the front lawn after too many cartwheels and looked up at the swirling blue sky above us, searching for clouds that could be pillows or unicorns.
Sometimes I nodded off, the grass it’s own supportive mattress. The clouds created a softness I could sense, even if I couldn’t touch.
Boredom came, but it always went. It was the blank slate, empty page, we needed to begin something new.
Embracing Next 