Hors de ma tête

The house where I grew up sits on a winding road in what some people might call the country. The rich country, as between the fields of hay, cattle, and goats, most of the houses tower over our stone-faced one-story. Country singer Kenny Chesney even used to be my neighbor (I toilet-papered his house once, but that's another story. When coming from the interstate and heading down that road, there are a few major curves. The second curve has been a significant turn in my life.
It's not the most dangerous curve--no, that's the fourth one. Also significant. Where I found a kitten in the ditch and named him Butterscotch. Where my mom saw Kenny Chesney having car trouble but didn't stop to help him. But the second curve is more significant still. It holds so many good memories for me and one big, bad one. This story is for the good ones.
See, when I was a kid I viewed the world differently. I hadn't yet built up these perceived limitations of my abilities and opportunities. I saw the world without blinders.
That second curve takes to the left, but another road forks out from it, straight ahead. When I was a kid, as we drove home from wherever, when we drew close to that curve, my brother and I would shout, "Go straight! Go straight!" And sometimes my mother humored us. Sometimes she went straight.
Once, I remember, she stopped to let us crawl into the back of my dad's blue pickup, and as we started up again down this road, the breeze caught my brother's baseball cap and took it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a cow standing in a ditch, blinking kindly at us, escaped from whichever fence was designed to keep it out of the road. But usually we just drove.
Why?
Who knew?
Because it was different. Because we were having so much fun driving together we didn't want the trip to end. Because we had not learned the societal dictation that when given a destination one must stick to the most efficient path there. Because we had no blinders.
Between then and now I picked up a pair of my own blinders, and I'm only just realizing I've still got them on. I'd like to unlearn those restrictions I've put on myself all these years, and I'd like to start seeing all those options I never knew were there. I'd like to lose the blinders.