Whenever I am asked to visit “my happy place”, I always fail to place myself somewhere. It seems like no matter where I go, the noise in my mind always follows. I’m always thinking ahead and worrying, caught up in some “what if?”, or somehow trying to get ahead of the future. Yet, as I am laying in my bed with windows wide open, I have realized it is here. Late spring, early summer. Warm, with a nice cool breeze. But never during the day, always at night.

There’s something so soothing about a warm night, stars above our heads while the world sleeps. I love being able to hear the frogs croaking and the wind swaying the trees. I find myself shocked by how the wind sounds so different in the summer. In the winter, it whistles between the bare branches, yet in the summer the wind comes alive. As the leaves brush together, I find myself beginning to believe that they are singing. The soft, low hum of heavy leaves swaying together, it somehow feels so human. And somewhere between the frogs croaking and the wind singing, I hear the occasional ringing of my grandparent’s flagpole.

Metal meets metal in the dead of night, and suddenly the flag pole has become something entirely different. During the day, the flag pole blends into the surrounding landscape. It has existed at that point in space and time for my entire life, and I realize now that it has become so mundane and familiar that it became invisible.

I find myself forgetting about it. It melds into its surroundings, becoming indifferent from the rounding smooth slope of the land, and the trees that frame my family’s property. Despite its stark height, and the contrast of man-made metal against the natural flourish of green, it all becomes one in the same. Yet at night, shrouded in darkness, the flagpole isn’t defined by its familiar height and frame. It is no longer as monotonous as the cars driving by, or the humming of my AC. I am unable to predict when metal will meet metal, I can’t anticipate how the rope will swing, or where the wind will blow- I can only sit and wait. So I sit, eagerly listening for it to ring out again. Warm nights like these have become my happy place. This is where, and when I feel most present.

As I reminiscence on those familiar summer nights, I cannot help but wonder what makes these mundane and ordinary moments stand out so fiercely in my mind. I do not understand how my feeble mind manages to take a moment, so identical to a hundred others, and find magic. Many of my happiest memories have no merit that qualify them as outstanding. My husband pushing a strand of hair behind my ear on our first date, driving down a country road at sunset, nights spent laughing with my sisters until our ribs hurt, and falling asleep on my parents’ couch- these moments shine so brightly when they should rationally pale in comparison to moments of grandeur.

There is some form of indescribable essence that surrounds these memories. It is almost as if they have been dipped in sunshine. My mother’s laugh shining as brightly as the sun in my mind, her voice coated in honey fills my ears. My father’s gentle humming burns through my chest like a soft sweet melody. My grandmother’s wind chimes ring through my fingertips and up my spine. I believe this sun-golden thread that weaves all of these memories together must be the familiarity of love. This thread has stitched up my heart time and time again, it secures my flesh and muscle to bone, and tethers my mind and soul to my body. My grandmother’s wind chimes, my mother’s laugh, my father’s humming are all soft moments of familiarity that define me. These are the moments that I feel within my bones and hear within my heart.

This familiarity of love woven throughout these small, ordinary moments is what creates magic in the memory. I am nothing more than a tapestry of everyone I have loved, everything I have experienced, everywhere I have been, and everything I have lost. Familiarity is the sun-golden thread that weaves each part of me together.

As I grow older, my heart will only grow fonder, and this thread of familiarity will have no choice but to be continuously spun. Hundreds of quiet memories will ultimately become thousands, until I have a spool that spans a lifetime. It is this sun-golden thread that ties my heart to my parents, sisters, grandparents, husband, and all those that came before me. This is the same thread that will eventually tie my heart to my children, and those that will live on long after I have returned to the earth. I think it is then, that maybe my thread will wrap itself around tree roots, climbing up the trunk towards the familiar golden rays of the sun. And as the sun sets, and the golden rays slink below the horizon, it is in that moment I will return to my happy place- surrounded in darkness and swaying among the tree branches. As I feel the wind pass me by, I will still be there waiting for the ringing flagpole in the dead of night.