Speaking of roads, I tagged Liz Strauss the other day with what Karin started calling the Turtle meme, so it only seems fair that Liz would turn it around on me! Sheesh, this thing’s getting more convoluted than the season finale of that ever-popular daytime soap opera, As the Worm Turns.

This time, she’s challenging me with a cyclogical psichlogical psycherflumigal mental survey she first heard from a psychologist (see? I can too spell it!) friend. OK, Liz, I’ll play along; I like challenges.

It consists of four questions:

1. You’re walking on a road. It’s your road. Tell me about it.
2. As you walk, you pass a body of water, describe it.
3. Directly in your path is an empty bottle. What’s your response to it?
4. You continue until you find yourself facing a wall that crosses your road perpendicularly. What do you do?

Now this is going to take a bit of faith on my part as to what this is all about; after all, I’m answering these before I read Liz’s responses. So if it somehow proves I’m, you know, insane or something, it’s not my fault! So here goes…

1. My road is a two-lane black asphalt road, with a stripe on each edge and down the middle that is the exact color of the flowers which also happen to cover the ground on both sides of the road. (In Texas we call them Indian Paintbrushes.) The sun is high and warm, and the land is rolling, curving and dipping smoothly over and around the hills, sometimes disappearing in the near distance, and reappearing farther away. There are no other people on the road but me, and I’m walking westward into a soft summer breeze.
2. The road dips a bit between hills, and crosses a small, fast-moving river. It’s about twenty feet wide, but not deep, with boulders and smooth, many-colored, hand-sized rocks embedded in its sandy bottom. The water looks very cool and inviting, and there’s a perfect spot for a quick wade.
3. An empty beer bottle? It’s a blight of trash on an otherwise perfect road. I pick it up to take it somewhere to be disposed of. It doesn’t bother me that I might have to carry it for miles, it’s too perfect a scene to leave it.
4. Hmm, what’s this wall doing here? How did it get here? Why would there be a wall here? What idiot would block a perfectly good road by placing a wall across it? I would try to figure out a way to climb it to see what’s on the other side, assuming it’s not so high as to be impossible to climb. Otherwise, I’d probably turn left and follow it until I reached the end or found someone to tell me why the wall was there.

All right, there you have it, four answers to four simple questions. Now, whatever does it mean? Maybe I should read the rest of Liz’s post now, before pushing the “Publish” button?

Or… do I feel lucky?