This is Pennsylvania Dutch country—open fields, with rising hills shaded by forests. I sit on a tree stump, here. I watch the sycamores and white pines, gleaming like ghosts in the nighttime. A grey squirrel scampers over dewy roots. The Susquehanna—so silently heard—seems so far away, its water splashing between rock and earth. A coyote howls. Crickets sound, under leaf and bark. There’s the drip-drip of the evening spritzing. The wind, right like angel’s breath, is sweet with honeysuckle and moist moss. Reddish glare of a feeding black bear shoots through a butterfly bush, blushing lilac in the luminescence. I watch the trembling swamp milkweed, the wild columbine, the turtlehead. A white-tailed deer stamps and chews on the Virginia wild rye. Smoky air rushes across, swaying between trees. The shivering stars glow. An icy moon stares through a crust of blue cloud. The sky is blossoming into a silvery violet.
The sky is the most beautiful thing in the world—perhaps even the most beautiful of all the Pennsylvania Dutch country. I’m at peace, here, in this paradise, staring at the sky, at this simplicity.

Anybody who says fantasy doesn’t exist is a liar. Because, just sometimes, when I’m here, alone in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, I feel like I can swim in the sky…and I do.