Mrs. Potter's Lullaby

Mrs. Potter's Lullaby by Counting Crows



When I was a senior in high school, this song was near perfect. For those hot, humid nights of a Chicago summer, when you're tired more from the heat than life... this song was just right. And that's still true today. It's a pretty song, but not overly pretty in the 'drop everything you're doing' kind of way. It just sums up a night.

I'm taken back to the porch at MEW's house in Oak Park. We would sit there, in her hammock, and talk about life and the future. Neither of us knew what we wanted, but we knew that we wanted something. We knew that we were supposed to want something, we set out to find what that was. And so we would sit there, talking about friends, family, and the world. We were innocent in most ways, probably overly optimistic, and yet to be beaten down by the fact that we were young. We were wise enough to realize that there was so much life to live, but since we had yet to see anything on our own, it was hard for us to imagine what the world was actually like. To us, love was what our parents shared, relationships were not complicated, and excuses were something only adults made. Like every teenager, we weren't going to be like other adults, we were going to tell it as it was (well, me at least).

Those were such nice nights, never perfect, but nice. No night was more memorable than any other. And that's okay, it's nice to have memories like that, were no night is so much better than any other. Once in a while we might walk around Oak Park, but for the most part we would take our place on the porch. We would spend hours changeling each others minds.

I miss that.