Going on a trip back home reminds me of doing acid.  LSD was an amazing mind-folding event for me.  It showed me, as the saying goes, the many different doors of perception hidden beneath the so-called day-to-day reality.  I was lucky that I had adventurous trips with careful friends in safe environments. 

Today I am driving through lands of my childhood.  Here is where I grew up, became an oldest sister, traipsed through school, first took off on my own for summers, learned about young love and wrestled with independent finances.  Summers with guitar-playing boyfriends, hitchhiking on dark winding roads, reverberating through eye-opening friendships beyond my parochial imagination.  Waitressing and lying, partying and working without sleep, sustaining on peanut butter and sugar sandwiches and grapefruit Tang–those were the days.

I soak in the brilliant shocking colors of autumn sugar maples and aspens that cover the old rolling hills.  I breathe the sweet fragrance of melting leaves and chilly wind.  I bow to the resting place of my mother beneath towering lodge pole pines.  I gather the wood roses on her grave, and walk in the Divine Peace of Her indulgence.

My heart folds as a mobius strip, weeping and smiling with love and aches.