Five Minute Friday – Turn

 I couldn’t have been more than four-years-old in the video that plays on the television screen. Flickering images of a little girl spinning around in her favorite skirt. I’m pretty sure that at the time I thought I looked as elegant and refined as the ballerinas I had seen. I never had dance lessons, but I did know how to spin – turning in circles to the music playing on the record player.

There was a confidence in those little legs that seems to have fled in recent years. Now instead of spreading arms wide and turning with wild abandon, I turn my head instead to see who is watching. I’m not sure at what point in life we make that transition from free to frozen.

It must have been sometime in elementary school. Those years where we take our first tentative steps out of the nest and into the big, wide, world. I suppose it was there that I learned that you could take classes to learn how to turn properly. It was probably there that I watched someone else perfect a pirouette and decided that maybe turning was best left for my living room floor and not for some fancy, far-off stage.

Turning points. Oh, that my children would learn how to dance with abandon. That they wouldn’t stop dancing because someone might be watching. That when it’s their turn to turn that they would hold their head high with confidence and turn toward the music and dance.