The hunter of dreams

Time hurries swiftly on,

Each fleeting year seems shorter than the last,
And many hopes which cheered its opening dawn,
Are buried with the past.
~Mary Ann H. Dodd Shutts, Passing Time

Once upon a time, I thought I had time. So much time that I never gave it much thought. So much time that I just used it as if there were an endless supply. So much time that I let it carelessly slip through my fingers.

I was young and didn't know better than that there would always be time and that everything would remain the way it was. How was I to know that I would grow up and grow older, and that time is like shifting sand. That the passing of time would wreak havoc on the world as I knew it. That houses would be built on what was once my playground.

And even if I should know better by now, I am still getting away from the present moment. There, it has gone. And another one. And another.

The past is wrapped in cotton wool. Put at the back of a bottom drawer and forgotten. Until one day you happen upon it, slightly warped and yellowed with age.

All it takes is a snippet of a half-forgotten song, a whiff of my mother's perfume, a photograph stuck between the pages of a book.

The time machine, its rusty cogs creaky with age, is put into motion and suddenly I'm back in 1974, with the radio playing in the background and me singing along in broken English.

Or 1969, standing on tiptoe in  front of the bathroom mirror, trying out my Mum's chalky lipstick and dabbing my wrists with her perfume. The one in the fancy bottle that she bought from the Avon Lady the other week.

Oh, and that photograph, it takes me right back to my grandparents' garden. It's the early 1960s, and I'm dressed in a pink corduroy frock, my curls all tangled from doing clumsy forward rolls on the lawn.

On Christmas Day, we walked back into Jos's past. Where his childhood house once stood, there's now a windswept tangle of shrubs and trees. Our booted feet keep slipping and sliding on the sticky clay which once provided the area's livelihood.

The passing of time has wreaked havoc here too, forgivingly blanketed in wilderness.

Now another year has passed. The  hands of the clock have ticked away the minutes, then the hours, until they turned into days. Days which have been strung together into strands of weeks, then woven into a pattern of months.

Twelve months. 52 weeks. 365 days. One year. And another one. And another.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

~William Shakespeare, from Macbeth

Still, I have always been and always will be a dreamer, a hunter of dreams, so I am raising my glass to you, my fellow dreamers, and to past, present and future dreams.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

~Eleanor Roosevelt

Linking to Patti's Visible Monday at Not Dead Yet Style one more time this year!