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A quote: “It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” ~~ Laura Ingalls Wilder
I’ll start with a story …
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“You can play outside but only until the streetlights come on.”
It’s how we spend our summer vacation. Bikes, skates, endless games of hide-n-seek or baseball at the end of the cul-de-sac.
High school is coming in September, so this summer I feel a little too cool to hang outside with the little kids. I sit on the porch in the gathering dusk, listening to them race up and down the street …
Olly olly oxen, free free free!
That’s Stevie. Too impatient to search for hiders. Gets upset anytime someone gets by him to get home free. I hear laughter mixed with exasperation.
“Geez, Stevie, you didn’t even get close to me and still call the game?”
That’s Debbie, the long-legged, sharp-eyed middle child of the Carter brood. She’ll be in my grade in the fall. Not lost on me that she’s still out playing. But she’s never cared about “cool”.
I shift, now a little uncomfortable on the porch alone. I’m still hearing Debbie marshalling the troops for a last game of Red Rover.
But today it’s still August and I’m not too cool, yet.
I get up off the porch, yelling “Hey wait! I want to play!”
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock Standard license
Phoenix says: Midnight Walk
The streetlights cast their gentle glow as Sarah stepped onto the quiet pavement, her bare feet finding comfort in the cool grass at the road’s edge. After months of corporate deadlines and endless meetings, she’d almost forgotten what silence sounded like.
The amber lights stretched ahead like a pathway home, each one illuminating a small circle of peace in the darkness. No emails buzzed on her phone. No traffic rushed past. Just the soft whisper of leaves overhead and the distant hum of a porch light.
She thought of her grandmother’s words, spoken years ago over morning coffee: “It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” How right she’d been. Not the promotions or the fancy dinners, but moments like this—when the world quieted enough to let her breathe.
A cat emerged from the shadows, padding silently across the street before disappearing into the night. Sarah smiled, continuing her walk. Tomorrow would bring its complexities again, but tonight belonged to streetlights and solitude, to the simple joy of placing one foot in front of the other on a path lit by nothing more than the gentle guardians of her neighborhood.
With every passing day this world was becoming more like home. Sometimes it seemed like just yesterday that we were looking at an open prairie of grass not quite like home.
Now houses stood along the streets that the Kitties had surveyed when opening this world for settlement — and many owners were already customizing them away from the bland mass-produced modules we’d unfolded and set into place. The Chongu Empire had planetary settlement down to a science, unsurprising with the vast frontier they needed to secure against an enemy that viewed any species of individuals to be vermin to exterminate, the way we view an infestation of ants or termites.
The lights were coming on — a little dimmer than we would’ve used, but Chongu are adapted to much lower light levels than humans prefer. Some of their half-grown kittens are still playing pouncing games among the shrubbery, but the diurnal species, including human children, have headed home for the night.
Give this place a few more years and it’ll look like Great-Grandpa’s stories of growing up in 1950’s suburbia. Well, other than the two big space stations you can see from the ground, that is. Back when Great-Grandpa was having adventures with his buds, Sputnik hadn’t even orbited, and Neil Armstrong was still flying fighter jets off carriers.
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