… Those moments when the world telescopes down, folds up like a map that will not go back the same way, creases turning inside out and sideways. Like that one time in an dim alcove of Notre Dame: “Of all the cathedrals in all the cities of all the world…”

Those moments when the lines of latitude grow short and the longitude cinches its britches.

Once, when I was a child, an elderly couple asked me for directions and I said, “I’m going that way, I’ll show you,” and they followed me through my own front door, old friends of my mother.

It is either that the world is small, and we have not come far, after all, from Adam and Eve, from Eden; or else I myself travel in slender spirals, always circling back unknowing to the hilly fields where life was simple, and my brother found the grass snake, smooth and harmless, yellow-green, coiled in his hand.