When I was a little girl my father often brought home boxes of used paper from work. My sisters and I would flip over the second-hand pages and fill the plain white backs with our drawings and our carefully printed words. We laid on the floor and wrote notes to each other, we dreamed about future careers and we drew up lists of names for the children we might someday have. We designed and sketched the houses we'd raise those children in, complete with indoor swimming pools and playrooms filled with toys that spanned entire floors.

I lived in my imagination as a child, and when I grew up I imagined my two beautiful children into being, and lucky me, they came with a kind, loving husband. I kept drawing and reading, I painted portraits in oils, wrote poetry, I fell in love with photography, I got very sick with MECFS and lost myself, and lucky me, I eventually partly recovered. A recent diagnosis of Common Variable Immune Deficiency may explain a lifetime of chronic poor health that limited my choices leaving me at times to feel as though I have lived only half a life, and yet...

...I keep on imagining. I write and I read and I take pictures of the people and the places that touch my life. I dream about my mother and father and I tell my brother and sisters my story, and they tell me theirs, the endings ever-changing and shifting as the years fly by. But the beginning stays the same, sweet and tender, three little girls on the living room floor surrounded by a sea of white paper and possibilities.