Photosynthesis

Greetings Indie Inkers! It's another week/another swim through our creative juices. This week I challenged Miss Ash, you can find her response to my challenege at; Perilously Precocious

 I was challenged by none other than Joelyn who simply asked that I: Describe the feeling of sun on your skin...

It beats the alternative doesn’t it? Or the other alternative that no one ever contemplates because they’re focusing too much on the absence of it. 

I remember, it was Steve Martin that said: “The lack of sunshine is like, you know, night.”

That sentence stuck with me, longer than it should have.

Rather than remember some old quote from, Sun Tzo or The Dalai Lama, I was lumbered with the burden of remembering a quip from Steve Martin of all people, WTH!

WTH exactly ... Who do you know that attributes the absence of sunshine to it being night time? It’s more likely that someone says something about the temperature, isn’t it? That would be the logical step in any rational-thinking person’s head.

I can’t remember the first time I felt it, but I remember the last. It was a Friday, a foggy start that didn’t hold hope of getting any better. I had poked a bare leg out the front door to get an accurate gauge of what the weathermen were struggling to tell me on TV. They predicted rain; my leg predicted a break in the fog at exactly 9am.

When the first few streams of light broke the clouds at thirteen minutes before the hour, I had already showered and dressed in shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of sandals. The decking in the garden was already set up as well as the homemade lemonade I had cooling in the fridge. 

On the window sill in the kitchen, my pot of drooping mixed roses slowly craned upwards in a concerted effort to catch the rays teasing themselves through the window, my leg, told me to head outside and enjoy.

By 9.10am it was warm, pleasant.

I sat sipping a glass of the good stuff as freshly cut grass tickled my toes. Beads of heat trickled up my ankles, into my calves and up my legs. I felt the beginning of my very own photosynthesis; sunlight = warmth = energy = positivity = happiness. I sat there smiling-in the cosmic juices, letting each breath, each heartbeat oxygenate my blood, travel through my veins and filter more goodness in through my skin. 

Inside me, the lemonade trickled down my throat and met up at the nucleus of the symphony of synthesised sunbeams that were being pushed back to the surface, giving my skin a brilliant glow on the outside. 

I looked down nonchalantly; taking note of a butterfly that had just perched on my arm. It was a sensational feeling that I barely noticed because it felt like there were already a million tiny butterflies walking all over my body, fluttering their wings casually, out of sync with their steps, causing tiny currents of wind to caress my skin; soothing the feel of their tiny legs tickling me all over. 

Sitting in the sun, drinking in its goodness; jolted my mind to different places, situations I’d been in where my body felt this good, where I was at peace. Each location brought back a collection of other memories of activities/journeys/outings with friends, family, lovers – and each memory conjured up more ingredients for me to synthesise into happiness. 

I lay there on my favourite sun-lounger – ice cold lemonade; sweating ice cold water dripping off the glass onto my chest, my mind here, there and often elsewhere, with nothing but fond memories massaged by sunlight.