or directly from 
On Sunday I had tried to explain to Mother, and that was what started it. I wanted to tell her how I felt about Allison. Not just that my daughter was swept away from us at an impossibly young age, but how, for me, that loss represented a broken chain. A chain of mother to daughter from the beginning of time—broken not just for today, but into infinity. My mother didn’t understand.
The next day, a sunny Monday afternoon by the lake, I looked down and saw everything in sharp focus, thinking this must be what the world looked like to an eagle or a foraging owl. The parking area and a line of trees running down to the water marked the west side of the scene. A field of jonquils bounded the east. They flattened in the stiff prairie breeze and then sprang erect again to shake their bright yellow heads in the sun. The original jonquil bulbs had been planted long ago by a woman who used to live in the town of Arcadia and who wanted to remember it as it once was.
Above all this and somewhere to the south, I was floating, but I had no sense of insecurity. It was as though I was suspended high above the ground, the still brightness supporting me in a transparent cocoon of white light. I was safe.
The constantly revolving lights on the AmCare ambulance were superfluous in the April afternoon. Flashes of blue and red, which turn the most minor nighttime accident into a scene of terror, lost any threat in the soft spring light. Even the popping strobes were pale incongruities compared to the brightness around me.
Look at all those people, I thought, running around like ants. The emergency personnel, clad in ridiculous orange pinnies, had the look of an awkward group of men trying to emulate a girl’s field hockey team. Their quick movements, a result of “rigorous training,” looked stiff and self-important. Their controlled haste somehow appeared jerky and contrived.
The only completely still object in the scene was me.
©2008, Janet Taliaferro
A Sky for Arcadia (Chapter One) – Part 2
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