The little girl gathered up her treasures - golden cats eye marbles and spools of jade green thread with which to play cat's cradle; threadbare velvet patches and tarnished pewter spoons that had been hidden in the back of the cupboard; blue willow china cups and her teddy bear with one shoe-button eye - and tucked them into a patchwork coat, and set out to find the moon. She had read about it in a book once and seen its shadow hide under the bed when she crawled in at night to sleep. She wanted to know what made it shine, and whether it really was made of green cheese and about the lady who live on the dark side. So she built a pirate boat out of willow boughs and branches that were kept in a pile by the well to build fires in the winter, and fashioned a magnificent sail of gypsy scarves and sashes and crushed linen blouses that smelled of lavender that she found in the attic. She packed sandwiches of whistle thin ham with cucumbers that snapped like July, and lemonade squeezed from a hot summer sky that puckered her mouth and tickled her tongue when she drank it. She fashioned a compass from her grandfather's old pocket watch and hung it on a shoe lace to swing from the mast, and made a spyglass to track the moonbeams casting sun dogs against the rolling clouds. The girl knew that all lady pirates always carried charts and journals for their trips, lest they get waylaid by the stars and thrown off course, so she packed her books of finely tooled brown leather etched in gold and stacks of ancient vellum maps into a rosewood case and placed it right behind the ship's wheel. And when all was ready, she unfurled the sail and felt the summer wind catch the billowing gauze and spin the hull of her ship star-ward, up into the night...


Credits:

Background (Made as a contest prize for me) -
Woman
Ship
Wings
Pocketwatch
Telescope
Books
Butteflies
Moths
Dragonfly
Globes
Stars
Textures
Brushes

I give permission to display my work.