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.
Copyright © Joyce Johnson | Year Posted 2012
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