It was around 4am that I rolled over, secure in the knowledge that I would remember the opening line for today’s blog. Did it come in a dream? Or just a dozy thought… It seemed beautiful though, this line, this moment.

I used to be so certain of so many things. That summers would last forever. And the friendships made within. School day friends seemed easier. We were thrown together daily. Delivered five days a week by bus. Guarded through the crossings. Marched into classrooms. Plopped side by side. Row by row. Friend by friend. But summer, you had to make an effort. To see your summer friends, you had to get on bikes, run through fields, skip, sweat and swim. You had to make telephone calls from kitchen mounted phones, and wait through busy signals and unanswered rings. Sone of us even wrote letters, making promises of BFFs, signing with hearts in our names, never thinking that the new school year would separate us by room and teacher.

As quickly as the summers went, the years seem to go by even faster. People and summers pass, like moments in the dawn. But still I smile, because I believe in the forever of it all — that summers don’t really die — they live on in a place that we can only reach in dozy, passing thoughts… Where my mother still plays like a little girl.

Wide-eyed awake, I see 2024 pulling up like a big orange bus, flinging open its door and welcoming us to the new year. Chubby-legged and ever hopeful, I pull myself aboard! Let’s ride!