12 days of Christmas in Paris (Illinois)

Day 1

Getting Lost with Amelia.

If she could stay out on her hiking expeditions in this national park in the state of Illinois, Amelia would have. She always enjoyed finding hideaway places she could escape to for a solid 30 minutes, the exact amount of time of all her meditation sessions, getting away from all the pressures to hold a certain online, social influence. She found the perfect cave to hide herself away from the world that surprisingly was just like the ones in her books she'd read about on this rather chilly cold December day. She was grateful and thankful for the warmth of the sunlight that was filtering in, and blessing Amelia was bits of warmth despite the chill in the air. She pushed her glasses up as they slid down her nose as the music from her Spotify playlist played from her Beats earbuds. 

It was never a problem for Amelia in making adventures like this on trails in national parks or locating caves that a person could hide away in for a few minutes or hours in Amelia's case. As a young one, she often was the one at all the family gatherings and birthday parties creating wonderful adventures with her cousins or neighborhood friends pretending to host a safari or climbing Mount Everest in her backyard. She was a tween constantly lost in her own thoughts, never really paying much attention to her surroundings or losing sight of the group in its entirety. Most parents would be proud to have a little social butterfly; however, Amelia's parents ended up being more worried of their daughter ending up on the side of a milk carton. Or finding their daughters body in the woods lifeless. The top two worrisome thoughts on every parent's mind when they couldn't locate their child, who was just before them two seconds prior. 

Several attempts later at intervening with many school counselors and mildly harassing their daughter to 'please stay within ear sight' and to always keep her phone with her, they gave up. Almost all scenarios ended with Amelia hosting hiking adventures or neighborhood book clubs with the other children in the neighborhood. 

Now that she was in her mid-twenties and pursuing a library science degree, her parents resigned and accepted that their daughter enjoyed making adventures that all her favorite authors created for her in their novels that she could never pull herself away from. Or absorbed in the wonderful and beautiful sights of nature that is around us, and that was perfectly alright with them. Amelia's phone buzzed in her pocket, and without breaking from her quiet meditation session she removed it from her jacket pocket, unlocked the screen to a text from Natalie, a friend she met from her book club asking her about her thoughts on the book that was up for discussion in the meeting next week. 

Immediately she locked her phone without responding completely fascinated by the picture God painted before her on the edge of this cliff overlooking Edgar County. It was not unlike Amelia to become so absorbed in sights and sounds around her that she wasn't paying attention to what was really going on. One time she simply never heard a car horn blaring from behind her until the car pulled into the gravel to go around her speeding off flashing an offensive finger in the rearview. And let us not forget about a time that she never heard her poor cat, Bennett, meowing until she herself had to use the bathroom. She opened the door to find that he had somehow shut himself inside. Oh, and then there is the time she was completely lost in a book that an annoyed Amazon driver left a special edition she had ordered out in the pouring rain.

Amelia was just never one to leave a deep meditation or a good book for much lately. Her dark hair was pulled to the top of her head, which was her go to hairstyle the mornings she felt like taking a hike or a run around the neighborhood. She had moved her glasses to the top of her head, where her glasses seemed wind up when the sun seemed to leave glares in the lens of her glasses, leaving her without that perfect 20/20 vision anymore. She had tucked her leggings into a fuzzy pair of socks, perfect for cold weather hikes. Yes, today was a gloriously normal day for Amelia, if only she had remembered that she had a work thing starting in a few short hours, this day likely would have stayed this way.