May Your Heart Be As Free As Your Toes

Today's prompt from Run With Scissors was to journal about summer -- what you love most about it.  Summer for me as a child always meant packing up our house and relocating an hour north to Westchester. where we had a bungalow in a small community called Pine Lake Park.  This 65 family community has a lot of history for me -- my grandfather was the first co-op president; my mother started going there at 13; I took my first steps on the beach there; and my parents, aunt & uncle, cousins and siblings and I all have cabins there and continue to summer together.  It's a place where I feel the spirits of my grandparents in the wind and the pine trees, and where my children are growing up with the same sense of family and community that nurtured me.

The first week at Pine Lake always involved walking around barefoot and toughening up our feet, so that we could go without shoes all summer.  Being barefoot all the time symbolized the freedom we had -- running through the park -- our parents knowing that someone was feeding us lunch and the collective community would keep us safe.  At Pine Lake we had, and now my children have, the kind of freedom that kids don't really experience these days.  Now, we're all about play-dates and cell phones and checking in all the time.  For me, summer is about the heart being as free as the toes!

Balzer Designs Second Floor Challenge this week was to use found objects.  For the flower stems in "Summer," I used cable ties.  I have a set of them in bright blue, hot pink, and grass green.  I don't need them to tie up cables, but they're so pretty, I couldn't want to throw them out.  So I used the green ones for the flower stems.  Years ago, I was throwing out some boxes that cushioned new windows for my house.  As I tried to fold them up, they took on the shape of houses and altars.  And after some paper mache, paint, paper and other found objects, here's what happened. Hmmm - I have to get back to that!!

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