As a child I spent hours gazing at landscapes in the patchwork quilt my grandmother tucked around me. Farms and hamlets grew up in remnants of Grandma’s print dresses. Grandpa’s work shirts sprouted towns. Older, unfamiliar patches formed mysterious hinterlands. Over the years, imbuing each patch with mood and legend, I envisioned myself fording rivers in fabric hollows and scaling cloth peaks, traversing the ridged boundaries of thread to adventure with the imaginary folk of all my patchwork provinces.
Once or twice I was able to stare downward with such mindless concentration that I felt myself actually sinking into the topography I had created: it broadened and opened beneath me as though I were descending slowly in a balloon. All around, hazily at first, bright forms—orange houses, lavender pastures, blue hills—materialized and quickened with life.
Just as I began to drink in the sensations of this new world—the odors of grasses and blooms, the rustlings of birds, the shouts of children playing ball in the distance—I pulled myself back with a wrenching effort, and afterward lay trembling on my bed. What would happen, I wondered, if I ever went in all the way?