Apple, Daydream, Memory

My older sister, Sarah, is the mother of an eighteen-month old girl, a precocious curly-haired toddler who shows less interest in carving a pumpkin than she does lying down in the grass beneath an apple tree. Claire was definitely showing signs of her Aunt Rachael this afternoon, Sarah debriefed in an email last week. She was in her own world. I remember my own worlds, my daydreams. They appeared on the way to school, to weekly piano lessons, church every Sunday. Always in the car, because we lived in southern Michigan, Amish country, landlocked by corn and twenty miles of back roads to the closest grocery store. I spent a lot of time dreaming out the window, looking at freshly tilled soil but seeing a dance floor, waxed to a perfect buttery sheen.