An Obe Maybe

An out of body experience? I hadn’t thought it might be that. I only knew that something happened that was strange and a bit scary, and it has happened twice. Both of these times I was driving my car in a very, very familiar territory. The first time I was headed for my favorite grocery store, as I had done at least once a week for many years. I never varied my route. Perhaps I had let my mind wander a bit, playing with words for a new poem or trying to decide just which flowers would look best in the design I was entering for competition. I rounded the corner for the last half-mile and suddenly everything looked strange, as if I had never been there before. The road stretched ahead with nothing looking familiar and the day had turned very bright. Everything became common place again, as the stop light marking my left turn into Safeway’s parking lot, turned green without my having to stop. My grocery shopping experience was uneventful and I had almost forgotten the weirdness of that day, when it happened again. This time I was even closer to my home. I had lunched with friends in the little town four miles down the road. I had raised my family in that town and then had married again and moved to a farm where we had built a new home, forty years before. Fifteen or a few more years ago, they had made a change in the road that went into town. Formerly it had circled around a high ridge, but too many accidents on that turn had caused the county to move a portion of it They had put in a wide curve in order to avoid the hill. Coming home from my lunch I suddenly disconnected from my surroundings. I was coming around the curve and absolutely everything was new and exotic to me. How could this be? I had just traveled this road in the other direction two hours ago I came back to my self at the stoplight. There on the opposite side of the road was the house I had lived in while we were building our home just a mile up the road. I put no name on my experiences… but I cannot help but ponder their meaning.