Once upon a time, I was a princess in a small, mountaintop, medieval village called Bajardo. Every evening the fog filled the valleys bellow and eventually crept through the damp, moss covered, eerily silent, cobble stone streets. I would leave my roof top terrace with its views of the valleys bellow and descend five flights of cool stone stair steps. The stone was so worn and loved by inhabitants of the past that smooth grooves were worn into each step from years of work as a trusted passage. After locking the thick, heavy, wooden door of my palace with a brass key as long as my hand, I would follow the fog and quietly tiptoe to the remains of a church in ruins at the peak of the village. Here, I would wait. As the temperatures slowly dropped, the fog would settle into the valleys and leave only the mountain peaks reaching up into the evening sky. My secret sitting spot on an old stone wall provided a private gallery of marvelous orange and red streaks of light painted across a canvas of fluffy white clouds that lay just below my feet. This masterpiece of nature was only present for a few long minutes as the sun slowly disappeared behind adjacent mountain peaks, it was a sight worthy of the great kings and queens of the past. I imagined myself stepping off my stony pillars, into the heavens, like Hercules joining Zeus and the other gods and goddesses. If my current reality hadn’t been so completely magical, I would have considered taking up residence in the clouds.
