Summer Saturday

Bring bring!

You are brought from your deep slumbering by the noise of your alarm clock. You grasp at your beautiful dreams, already fading, but catch only wisps and tendrils.

Bring bring! Bring bring!

You open your eyes to the rumpled landscape of sheets. Somewhere out there, your feet poke up peaks, your hands are hills, your body is one long mountain range, and everything else is plains that slope to the steep cliffs.

Bring br–slam! Tha-chunk!

You bring a fist onto the darned thing and listen lazily as it hits the floor. You know that this is the fifth alarm clock you’ve gone through, but somehow, the thought doesn’t register to your sleep-muddled mind. Later, you might curse your stupidity at the sight of an alarm clock-sized hole in your allowance, but for now, you merely sit in bed, slightly upright, eyes unseeing and blurry.

You know that your siblings will soon wake and stink up the bathroom, so you move with a necessity, forcing energy into limp limbs and legs. You step over the mess of your room, hardly registering the piles of clothes and books.

Out in the hall, you are hit squarely in the face by a ray of light that fought to reach you. It is shining through a window in your sister’s room, even though both curtains and door are usually closed at this time of the day for her. It is an unexpected incident, but serves to bring you more fully to consciousness.

Down the hall you go, seeing, hearing and smelling more and more. Something like blueberries, orange juice and coffee drifts up from the stairs, and you can hear your mom humming busily as she prepares your lunch or your backpack or whatever else moms do for their offspring in the mornings.

But then you remember, with perfect pleasure, that this is a Summer Saturday, and your mom is doing nothing related to school. Maybe she’s fixing yet another cup of coffee, or maybe feeding the dog.

These thoughts run through your mind like the water in your fingers and hair; the water that you splash over your face and arms. You’re glad for the cold that fully wakes you.

Teeth brushed, toilet flushed, down you go to breakfast, taking the steps two at a time just because. The smells are stronger now, and your stomach pulls you to the kitchen. Images fill your mind of what you anticipate, realer for the smell coming to you.

Grin. Good-morning. Kiss.

And then you sit down at the place already set out for you. For a moment, you revel in the sight of your food laid out, the contrasting colors merging with the smells and becoming a delicious whole.

Yellow eggs, brown toast with red jam, pancakes dotted with spots of blue, a tall orange glass…inhaaaaale.

And then you dig in, your fork coming slower than you would wish it. The tastes explode in your mouth, swirl down and make way for even more, and more…and more. Until, finally, you sit back in your chair completely contented and comfortable.

Up above, you can hear the siblings and Dad wake up, but for now, it’s just you and Mom and your full stomach, sending forth messages of bliss that massage your brain.

And even though you’re no fortune-teller, you know every Summer Saturday will be this way, maybe even every day of the week.

For three long months. What more could you want?