plants have dreams too

Do you remember swinging when you were a kid? It seems to me as if the majority of my childhood was spent pumping my legs, kicking off my shoes, and fearlessly flying through the air, somehow managing, despite my hindering clumsiness, to always land on my feet. My sister would scream, as she reached the peak of the swingset, "Look at me, Lyssa! I'm a bird!" Or my many friends, for everyone seems to be friends during those formative years, yelling out such metaphors as, "I'm a plane!" For myself, however, pretending to be something so common as a bird or a plane was absolutely out of the question. I was always that weird kid. You know the type. The kid you caught talking to household plants, because "plants have dreams too." The kid who deliberately put her left shoe on her right foot because her shoes were getting tired of being on the same foot day after day. The kid who was happy playing by herself, for she was never alone in her mind.

I would yell out, with pride and a huge grin, "I'm a pterodactyl!"

When you're a kid, the idea of "growing up" seems impossible. I remember being asked, year after year, that incessant question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Being the mischievous little girl I was, I would always answer differently. My favorite answer was "lumberjack." Of course, I had no idea what that job would entail. I was fairly certain, however, that it had everything to do with pancakes.