There are two ways to get enough. One is to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
In the late 1950’s, before seat belt mandates, my family traveled to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan as August blasted heat on the road ahead. A wavering illusion I haven’t thought about in years, not since air conditioning changed the comfort of driving. The inside of the car experienced hot air moving through open windows, what was later known as 455 AC. This was our vacation before school started.
We kids sprawled out in the wayback of Dad’s station wagon. After we crossed the first state border at least one of us would ask, “Are we almost there?” We were miles from the first white birch tree.
Comic books rotated through all four of us. The thick kind. Perhaps they cost a quarter each. And I would stare at cows, at least for the blink that it took to pass them. Like a turned page in an Archie comic book. I was a city girl and rarely saw any creature larger than a bulldog. Interesting, but part of a world as foreign as characters whose stories began and ended in colored squares on numbered pages.
If only…two words, three syllables. And yet, now, I reach into the concept and wish for an earlier wisdom. My vacation lives now. Newly budded trees. Blue, cloudless skies. A deer crossing the yard.
Yes, I know. I can’t change the past. Learning requires time. Experience can’t come in a definition, no matter how well it is stated.
A pair of goldfinches stop at our birdfeeder, and I stand back far enough away to watch without frightening the creatures. Spring. The birds’ golden feathers have returned. I am in this moment.
And that is enough.
terrypetersen 
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