Under My Tongue

That's where the words were stuck, right under my tongue.

I snored myself awake, after dreaming of wading through tall prairie grasses, swirling a walking stick beside me to stir away any critters that I might not want crawling up my skirt. When I pulled back the covers, set my bare feet on the round rag rug Grandma Priscilla made that sits on the floor by my bed and stumbled to the bathroom, the dull awakening that it's another day of mid-winter in an apartment in a place that calls itself a city with not one ounce of the hustle and luster of Manhattan, I groaned, looked at myself in the mirror and said, "She hadn't found the time to let herself grow up."

What might that possibly mean?

Now that those words have escaped from under my tongue, I need to examine them, toss them around a bit, allow them to somersault across my computer screen until I know what they want to be when they grow up. I doubt they apply to my almost sixty-year-old self. Perhaps it was the beginning of a story about a girl on the prairie, although I can't think of a more boring subject to write about, personally.

And so I must ponder this.......