The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,22

presence.

It was the summer after I graduated from high school, when Miss Hannah, the Korean War doctor, took me to a place she said I needed to experience. I don’t remember how she knew our family. She seemed always to be there when I was growing up. The frail shrivel of old age had gotten hold of her. Even so, she did the driving that day, making me nervous with her weaving and her not wearing a seat belt. (“I’m too old to learn now.”) We arrived in the late afternoon and entered a one-story brick building that looked from the outside like a dentist’s office. Indoors, though, we found a large room with a vaulted ceiling and the familiar wooden pews arranged to face each other.

At the center of the meetinghouse ceiling was a glowing square of light. There were a few people already inside. They tilted their heads back so they could look at the roof—or rather, through the roof, because the square of light was simply a hole in the ceiling, opening up the room to the sky.

“You’ve never been here?” Miss Hannah asked.

I shook my head. She led me to one of the front benches. To my surprise, instead of sitting, she stretched herself out on the wood full-length.

“It’s okay,” she said. “My neck stopped bending that far a long time ago.”

Tentatively, I sat next to her. I looked at the other people, uncertain what was going on. Miss Hannah told me to watch the sky.

At first it still looked like the sky. The edge of a graying cloud was visible. The occasional bird shot across the opening. As the sun lowered itself, the nature of the light began to change. Minutes passed. After some fidgeting, I found a comfortable way to arrange myself and let my body go numb.

“Keep watching,” she said.

The light was blue now and pure. Bright and glowing. The longer I stared, the closer it seemed to get. Could I touch it? I almost thought so. Once my sense of distance was gone, I lost all concept of time as well. This experience required waiting.

So blue. I’d never seen anything like it before. Not in a museum, not at the movies, not in the carnival tents at the fairgrounds. Yet there was no trickery, no sleight of hand. There was no variation in the hue, no sense of depth. We were gazing into infinite color. The wonder of it was, there was no wonder at all. This was a spectacle available to anyone with eyes to see, always at the same time or thereabouts. Still, I had never seen it, I realized. I had never seen the sunset.

And I wasn’t seeing it now. All this was, when I stopped to consider, the change that happens to a little patch of abstracted sky when the sunlight dies. I sat there unmoving as the time ebbed away, an ocean tide washing away the deep indigo to leave purple midnight in its wake.

“That was amazing,” I said on the way out.

Miss Hannah looked at me sideways. “You think so? I come here whenever I need to remember what the world really is. Sometimes I forget how to look. If that happens to you, you’ll know where to go.”

When my brother called long distance to tell me she’d had a car accident and it didn’t look promising, it was finals week of my first semester. Coiled up with academic anxiety, the news hit me hard. I promised myself that during the Christmas break I would go back to the meetinghouse with the open roof and watch the sunset again. I’d felt a presence there—not just Miss Hannah’s, but the blue throbbing fullness up above and all around me. I wanted to feel that again.

Back home, finals behind me, I tried to find the place where she’d taken me. Though I reconstructed the journey as best I could, I was never able to discover that meetinghouse again. I described it to my parents and to Gregory, but none of them had ever heard of such a thing. And then Miss Hannah got better, but my world became crowded and, well, isn’t that just the way of things?

Up on stage, the worship team transitions from one of their slow numbers, then lowers the volume to a quiet hum. One of the leaders intones a transitional prayer. A haloed floodlight comes on in the rafters, projecting a gold circle at center stage. Rick appears from the darkness, taking the