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So Roberta Allen’s question for this week’s Sandbox Writing Challenge 29 was:

What makes life magical?

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But I couldn’t resist being curious about what everyone’s magical day would look like so I threw in one of my own. 😀

What would your perfectly magical day be like?

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So what makes life magical for me? Being anywhere by the ocean. There is something about listening to a breaking surf that calls my name. I’ve never understood the attraction. Especially since I nearly drowned at a beach when I was six or seven. One of my favorite quotes is from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and tries to explain this fascination. It is:

And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur…and many of the Children of Iluvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.

Maybe it’s the fact that I DON’T understand it that makes it seem so magical to me. But I could sit and listen to the sea for hours…

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Then, what would your perfectly magical day be like? This was a bit harder to pin down, but I finally had the thought that magical days are really made up by perfectly magical moments. Moments that kind of sneak up on you and take your breath away. Moments like:

— Coming home from the hospital with baby Brandon after six years of trying to get pregnant.
— Stefanie crawling into bed with Drollery and me the morning after we brought her home from Portland. She was seven-years-old, and that was that! She was ours.
— It went on to become a habit! She’d come home from a date, and if I were still awake and Drollery was still up, she’d come crawl into bed with me and tell me all about it. The most precious time, though, was right after she had her first baby and she was insecure and wanting to be reassured she’d be a good mom. I just laid there and held her for a long, long time.
— Bran’s singing his final project for his senior choir class. He invited me to come listen. He sang If I Can’t Have Her from Beauty and the Beast. I was floored when he hit the high note at the end, and he got a standing ovation. I just stood there and cried.
— Family Camps at our cabin in the Unintahs when all seven homies would bring their families and we’d spend three days in chaos, playing games, eating, sitting around the fire at night.
— A mommy/daughter date with Stef to see While You Were Sleeping while Drollery and Bran were gone out of town.
— Meeting Kim, my very first online friend, at the airport the first time she flew in from Australia to stay with us.
— Meeting our friends Serge and Roberta in Quebec City for the first time.
— Drollery’s graduation from the university after nearly 18 years of going part time.
— Spending a few minutes alone with Stef before she walked down the aisle at her wedding. Marveling at her standing there in her beautiful sari and reflecting on her life from seven to that moment. What a ride!
— Our 35th wedding anniversary when we renewed our vows and had a huge reception and then dinner for our closest friends at a local restaurant. It was SO much better than our wedding.
— Meeting Plato on line and being so blown away by the way it happened.
— The marriage of Greg Miller, our bff’s son, who had been wounded in Iraq and received the purple heart. That was a day of such joy.

Obviously I could go on forever. But the point is, I’ve had a really magical life already. And for my perfectly magical day I would want to relieve each and every one of my magical moments all over again because sometimes I just need to be reminded what kind of a magical life I’ve had.

I would end my day back at the water in the Chesapeake Bay Lighthouse B&B where my partner in crime Amy and I stayed in September 2000 when we ran away to the east coast for a vacation. Laying there at night listening to the waves hit the shore was the best sleep I ever had. And though I love Amy to death, that is the only moment I’d change for my magical day, because this time I’d be lying there falling asleep in the arms of someone I loved… 😉

`lighthouse

(Written from the upstairs window of the hexagonal lighthouse on Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland.)