I imagine occasionally a place I can go to get away. Not so much my physical self. More my mental self. Just a little getaway where I can smell cookies baking and that wonderful newly polished wood smell. Where bitty sparkly little sunbeams find cracks in the window sills and gayly they chatter and scatter through them into the room filling it with light and almost imperceptible laughter. Perceptible if you know what you're listening for.
Sunbeam laughter. Like a gaggle of 10 year old girls at a birthday party.
But the only way you really hear them is that you see them. Like hearing with your eyes, listening to the light as it virtually dances across the old wooden floors and up the walls and across the ceiling made of pale peach colored plaster. I think dogs can actually see them, like little girls made of pure light in pastel dresses with bows that tie in the back. Little 50s girls. The I Like Ike generation completely unaware of technological advances. They would not run around looking for a Wii or a laptop or a flatscreen tv. They would make snowmen out of dust bunnies if there were such things there, but there wouldn't be because the place would be perfectly immaculately clean.

It would be a place that had cold milk and warm blankets: soft slippers and hard candy: tall ceilings and low shelves covered with sea shells and buttons and marbles of every color on earth. And books everywhere. The mere entry into such a room would lower your blood pressure and raise your hopes almost to the moon.

The best thing about it is that you would finally or at last (or maybe even in a discovery of complete amazement) become aware that there is God and he just adores YOU. God would welcome you and shush the sunbeams from their noisy giggling and dust bunny snow man building and then ask you if you'd like to stay for a while.
You would at first ask if this was Heaven and the sunbeam girls would wriggle their sumbeamy selves and try not to make noise, and God would remind you that Heaven was not a place but was a state of mind.
And no, you would not be moving in there. You would be going back to work or school or the PTA or whatever you had been doing.
This, He would say with a gesture across the room, this, She would say watching the dog watching the sunbeams, this is just a little time out for you. A break from your ordinary routine. A place to come and sigh and refill the well of your soul. Fill it to overflowing,
because it looks a little low.....


"Come. Sit. Eat. Doze. Read a little. Have some more milk.
Pet the dog. Try the cinnamon candy. Count your blessings. (There's a pen with my name on it and a piece of stationery with lines counting up to fifty. You can use the back side of the paper if you go over fifty," God would say parenthetically with smiling eyes.)

"We just want you to know how much you are loved. Everybody is you know.
But today we wanted to remind you because you look like you might need a little boost."

~~~
I call this little place the Pencil Me Inn. An inn tucked into the woods on the east side, beside the ocean on the west, near a lake on the south side and on the north side of the property are grassy green hills. Impossible perhaps, but really what is impossible when God owns the world? And the Inn.
Where Love Always Makes Room For More is the subtitle of the Inn. Because
no reservations are ever necessary, there is always a vacancy just for you. And whenever you arrive there, you are treated as if you were the only guest, the cherished guest, the dearest guest on earth.

There are always your favorite flowers at the front desk.(and the amazing thing, or so I am told, is that if two people are waiting at the desk, even though there is only one vase of flowers, each person standing there will see their own favorite.)
"Ummm, peonies," you might say, breathing in deeply the fragrance that recalls childhood to you.
"Yes, I know," will say the person standing next to you. "Gardenias. Always my favorite. My dad used to grow them."
"Mine too." you will add. But you are still talking about peonies…

~~
Today I wish I could take the people of Japan to the Pencil Me Inn for a little healing time. Absent that, I do hold them in my prayers."