Hydra, New Hampshire

This is a lyric essay about a blind writer’s childhood in rural New Hampshire in the early 1960s. The piece highlights the loneliness of blindness and the ways in which kids invented games in the woods and fields in the last moments before television, revealing the stream of consciousness of the blind child who finds in mythology a rich way to understand the world. If Buddhism is right and there’s no separation between the outer world and our inner lives, then a small New England town that was down on its luck and a crippled boy’s imagination are covalent, stranger when put together than anything that can be written on a postcard.