Only The Brave Deserve The Fair

We exit the main highway and drive down a tree-shaded road. Katie is checking her phone in the back while Audrey cheerfully continues to chatter away, periodically taking both hands off the wheel to gesture emphatically about a point she is making, and I watch the road in front of us, taking in the gorgeous green of oak and pine surrounding us on all sides.

Suddenly, for no reason, my vision seems to somehow expand, and where I normally see in a narrow slice in front of me, I now see wide-screen, as if the world has opened up, like in The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy’s story goes from black and white into full-blown, saturated color.

My stomach drops away, like I’m not so much moving through the world as falling into it, hurtling into a space that is so rich and deep that I will be swallowed up, so I pull back my consciousness, startled, and the world obligingly retreats into its usual narrow band, normal, ordinary, and I wonder what I have lost.