Break Free

This morning I was following my dogs down a hall in our apartment building. We were returning from our very early morning run. I began to think about the house where we lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The dogs were unexpectedly gone, they disappeared. I stood in the living room of the casa looking around. I was with the family of our landladies. They were no longer women my age but little girls. Their brothers and sisters and parents and I were all speaking to each other. Their primary language is Espanol Nuevo Mexicano, a unique Spanish dialect containing medieval words and phrases which can be very difficult for other Spanish speakers to understand. I don’t know what language we spoke, but the house looked like it originally had when it was first built.

We talked and laughed and had a wonderful time.

Suddenly I looked around and I didn’t know where I was. The house and everybody in it were gone. I was following two dogs I didn’t know down a hallway I didn’t recognize. I stopped and looked around with a sense of panic. What was going on? I followed the dogs a few more steps. We were at a place where two hallways intersected. I began to return to the present from a time I knew to be at least sixty years earlier.

Oh, boy, I thought to myself. Another one of those.

Those are the times of my life when I have broken free of our place in time and space. I cannot say precisely the day or time it first happened because it’s been happening all of my life. I know that when I was six and my grandfather lay dying in his bed…