"De seaweed is always greener...."

"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," or, as Horatio Thelonious Ignacious Crustaceous Sebastian puts it in The Little Mermaid, "de seaweed is always greener in somebody else's lake." Even though the grass analogy is cliche, and the seaweed twist only slightly less so, I'm reminded a couple times a year how true it is that we have a tendency to want something different from what we've got. For instance, every summer around the middle of July, after the beauty of June has worn off and the festivities of the 4th have died down and the novelty of 100-degree-days has worn off entirely, I get an intense, almost irresistable desire to listen to Christmas music. I mean, it's all I can do not to pull the blinds, turn up the air conditioning, put on a sweater, and listen to Amy Grant's christmas album while baking cookies. I long for the colder weather of fall, for the first snowfall, to hear the furnace come on for the first time, to decorate and bake and be cozy inside instead of melting. And if my mom didn't hide the Christmas music, I'd give in to my cravings.

Right around this time of year, however, late February/early March, when I'm all Christmassed out, all the Valentine chocolate is eaten, and there are two uninterrupted months of slushy gross leftover winter between now and Easter, I get an equally intense longing for summer. For days when you step outside and hear sprinklers and smell fresh-cut grass, for floaty summer skirts and for FLIP-FLOPS, for evenings that are so gorgeous you never want to spend them inside and for hearing crickets and standing in line at the water park eating ice cream as drops of chlorinated water sizzle away on your skin.

I'm so fickle. I think we all are. We can come up with a hundred reasons to want it to be the weekend, or summer, or Christmas, but once we're there it somehow doesn't live up to the expectations we had, or we acclimate quickly and become desensitized, and before long we're wishing for the opposite again.

That brings me back to The Little Mermaid; Sebastian sings to Ariel about how she'd miss the sea if she were human, but Ariel doesn't hesitate. She knows she'll miss her family, but Eric is her true love, and she chooses to become human forever (nevermind the stupid sequel) to stay with him, because he's the most important thing in the world to her. That makes me think of a place and time we can all look forward to without any fear that we'll "get bored" after we've been there awhile, a place where we're not going to want the opposite after a few weeks. When we are in Heaven with our True Love, we're not going to be homesick for our lives on earth. Summer or Christmas.



(But since we're not to Heaven yet, my advice is to substitute Disneyland as often as you can. Plan your vacation, or just enjoy the sparkly mouse pointer and music at http://www.disney.go.com. No I do not work for Disney.)