Cheerio!

Well, it is Saturday, which means you have to suffer through a bit of my writing. But this week's selection is not a fiction blurb. It is something I jotted down during my first visit to Hyde Park, and now you all get to read my thoughts! Enjoy, friends, and Happy Saturday!

If you ignore the sounds of the cars driving all around, if you forget the motors of busses and the chopping of helicopters, you might be able to imagine what it must have been like. The sounds of horses hooves and carriage wheels invade your imagination, even as you see an old newspaper tumbling in the breeze. You might see young men trying to impress their ladies in their fast riding phaetons, or lovers strolling along winding paths striving to embody propriety even while their hearts beat faster within them. Proud men in fine clothing on horseback with their fine ladies sidesaddled beside them. Back when men were gentlemen and women were ladies and chivalry was not dead. If you forget that you are walking on paved roads in your out-of-place modern clothes and shoes, your camera dangling from your wrist, your backpack on your back. If you forget all of that, then you might be able to feel how it felt. To see with your eyes and your mind what your heart already knew. Peace and tranquility and nature surrounding you, filling you, until you wonder how you ever went without it. And then you find another path, one that is not paved, and suddenly there is nothing but you and the dirt beneath your feet, the sky above your head, and the beauties that encompass you. How will you go back? How can you, having found this, leave and return to the emptiness you once inhabited? All that is spread before you are the beauties of God and man blending together in perfect accord. And though you are oceans and miles from where you live, you are home.