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"A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been 'blasted with excess of light.'"
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
MY NEIGHBOR HAS COVERED A PILE OF FIREWOOD WITH A sheet of milky plastic that catches the breeze like a pale silk parachute.
Please notice I said "like." I know it isn't a parachute. I also know it isn't silk, though I'm not absolutely sure it's plastic. I haven't looked at it up close. I don't want to spoil the illusion. Because every single morning when the sun hits it, I'm startled by the beauty of the thing, by the way it seems to radiate a shimmering, shifting light. At night it's even better. The woodpile is situated beneath a house lamp that comes on when the sun goes down. When that happens, the billowing plastic becomes an opalescent pearl. And every single night, I think: Angel!
I could almost worship this firewood covering, if I were looking for that kind of miracle. But in the second it takes me to go through the mind's first drafts--parachute? silk? pearl? angel?--a different section of my brain takes over and says, Plastic: not a thing to waste your time on.