Cryptic and True, All at the Same Time

When my husband is driving and I am the passenger, he is forever reminding me that men have superior depth perception. Especially compared to me. He heard that fact one time and our experiences in motor vehicles seem to back up this idea. I'll be stomping the imaginary brakes and clutching the arm rests while he's still accelerating, even though a parade of brake lights shine in front of us. He'll say, "Relax!" which has never made me relax, not one time, not since the first time he said it to me nineteen years ago.

The other day, I was idly chatting on the phone with my neighbor, the one whose house was hit by a falling tree a few weeks ago. She'd called to let me know her sick son wouldn't be going to school. (We carpool.) My son wasn't going either--he missed the whole week due to this flu bug--and then we wandered from topic to topic. I washed dishes while we talked and then stood and gazed out my back window.

Over my back fence is a new development of houses and on the other side of that little development is a sporadic row of trees, tall, spindly Douglas Firs with clumpy branches at the tops of long trunks. They look kind of like feather dusters and during windy days, I liked to watch them sway back and forth.

As you imagine, when we had the wind storm, those feather duster trees whipped back and forth and some of the tops snapped clean off. In recent days, I've noticed gaps in the line of trees. And then, that morning, I saw that in that particular stand of Douglas Firs, only one remained.

As I watched that morning, phone to my ear, that tree began to wiggle and then it began to fall. I hollered into my unsuspecting friend's ear, "OH MY GOSH! THAT TREE IS FALLING! IT'S GOING TO HIT THAT HOUSE!" She has no idea what I was talking about, but having been the recent victim of a falling tree herself, was appropriately panicked.

And then the tree fell, missing the house completely.

It's all about depth perception. And how mine is wacky. I always sense danger when danger is not within arm's reach. As you can imagine, this makes me jumpy and suspicious.

But "jumpy" and "suspicious" are pejorative words. I prefer to think of myself as aware and discerning. For each negative, there's a positive, right? And, if you are negative, you must admit that for every positive there's a negative. Maybe that's just me.

As I pick my way through the maze of life, occasionally bumping into dead ends and circling in cul-de-sacs going nowhere, I sometimes open a door and come face to face with a sneering, leering crowd who holds up a distorted mirror, reflecting back a warped image of myself.

And so I do what any jumpy and suspicious aware and discerning girl would do. I already know what I look like--I am obsessively aware of my true self and how I really am when I'm in the dark--and I refuse to play along with a fun-house mirror game in which I am psychoanalyzed by the clowns. My faults are grievous enough as it is. So, I slam the door closed, deadbolt it, build a brick wall in front it, drag a heavy chest in front of the wall and carry on.

No looping back for me. No changing my mind and turning back. No way for them to get in and no way for me to waver. And once that door is barricaded, it's like the fate of those drug tunnels that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) sometimes find burrowing under the border between Mexico or Canada and the U.S. Even though the tunnels are engineering marvels, testimony to the dedication and determination of their creators, the DEA officials unapologetically fill them with concrete.

I've filled in the tunnels with concrete. I go forward. I won't look back.

The weird thing is that I thought they were closer than they really were. My depth perception fails me again.