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Maybe, I’m just simple minded.

That thought came bubbling up to me as I was getting the dishwater ready. ­­

I squirted Joy into the dishwater and a hundred bubbles came floating up and simply filled my heart with  — ‘joy.’

I stood mesmerized as the tiny bubbles of rainbow colors popped, one by one, until there were none.

My son came in the kitchen and caught me smiling to myself.

When you get to be my age, you have to be very careful of the things you do. If you appear a little odd and repeat yourself too many times, well, they have places for folks like that.

“I was just smiling at these soap bubbles,” I said realizing as soon as the words came out of my mouth that they had not come out the “right” way.

My son glanced at the dishpan, nodded very accommodatingly and made his way out the door.

I could have told him about blowing soap bubbles through the lid of a Mason jar but, then, he would have thought that odd, too.

Or, how, sometimes I would like to lie on my back in the middle of the pasture and watch the clouds float by or the stars twinkling at night or how I would take off my shoes and walk barefoot along a sandy road , or splash barefoot in a mud puddle or catch tadpoles in the shallow water of the fishpond.

It’s been a long time since I made a mud pie or a frog house or sipped the nectar from the honeysuckle vine or dusted my nose with a buttercup.

I can’t remember the last time I made a sandcastle or dug a tunnel or wrote my name in the dirt. But I remember doodling a bug and tying a string on a June bug’s leg and catching lightning bugs in a jar.

As I stood there washing the dishes, those memories stirred so familiar in my mind, it was as if I were a child again, pulling back that sapling, straddling it and then lifting my feet and flinging myself into the air.

I put the dishrag down and walked out on the porch. The moon was full and the night birds were singing…and I was smiling … and I didn’t care.