Mind Travel

A Sunday morning write assignment: describe where you'd go if you went in the directions your windows face.

The light comes in the kitchen windows in the morning

eastern light, first light, often rose colored, sometimes pure gold.

It rises in increments, sending shadows scurrying,

painting first the ring of trees that forms my horizon,

then lifting like a stage curtain to reveal the whole scene

of yard and neighborhood and known world.

I could walk east forever, never reaching the sun’s source.

Instead I’d wander the back roads of New Marlborough,

skirt the lake’s edge in the Sandisfield State Forest,

ease myself down to sit and watch the sun head south

before heading west, south to Connecticut and its valleys,

south to my old home street, where my footprints are everywhere

in the fields and woods, where the trees wait for me.

I could walk forever west, never reaching the place where the sun sinks -

sometimes orange, sometimes pale pink, sometimes trailing ribbons of scarlet.

I would find my way to Copake in New York, and the Taconic Range,

a string of mountains over which storms boil, massing purple clouds

full of thunder and furious lightning. Or, if I veered southwest, arrive in Boston Corners,

a hamlet of the town of Ancram, once a town of outlaws and gangsters

protected from the long arm of the law by a mountain barrier.

If I walked north, in the direction of cold winter winds, toward the tall pines

I see from my study window, I would reach Housatonic, named for its river, or the Egremonts, North and South, built into the hills. I could follow Route 7 through Great Barrington into Stockbridge, Lee, Lenox, through Pittsfield, Lanesborough, North Adams, walk on up through Vermont, cross the border into Canada, perhaps fall off the edge of the earth there.

My mind travels farther than my feet ever will, through unfamiliar towns,

through dark woods and light-filled meadows, across streams and brooks,

sturdy bridges and footpaths, 

down dirt roads, 

along macadam, 

into the houses of strangers and so across the landscapes of their individual minds. 

My own small world becomes the world at large, 

expanding in every direction, 

always ending somewhere 

and never ending at all.

Head to my other blog, Laughing On the Way Out, for more adventures.