Mandy, your line about stepping out of the fog into the darkness, reminds me of something that happened to me on Wednesday. Sometimes we "see" better in the dark than we do in partial light.

I came home to find myself locked out of the house because I gave my daughter my key and forgot to put it back on the key ring when she gave it back. I walked around the house trying to find a window that was partially opened that I could maybe squeeze through. I was hoping I could just cut out a screen instead of breaking glass. That would have been the easy thing, right? No such luck. We'd had a wind and rain storm the night before and I'd shut the windows too much to do that.

I finally decided busting a window was the only option, and the last thing I wanted to have to do because then I'd have a mess to clean up. Which window to break? Not the big ones with double panes. Not the single panes in the living room, someone could walk into the unlocked front porch and climb right over the window sill. Couldn't get up onto the roof to get into my son's window that could have just the screen cut out. I decided on one of the basement windows. They're single pane and small, and there's a ledge that runs around the entire basement that I could crawl onto and then lower myself the 4 feet or so to the floor.

I went out to the garage and got a blanket and a metal weed popper. I laid the blanket out to catch the glass and smashed the garden tool through the glass. My stepdad had put a thick slab of pink foam insulation into the window this past fall to keep some of the heat in. It kept the glass from flying everywhere. It was so dark, I had to do everything by feel. The street light wasn't in a position to give me enough light. I had to pull the glass shards out of the edges of the frame, pick some up off the grass so I wouldn't get cut when I started crawling through, had to pick the glass up that went inside the basement. I was pretty sure I got it all.

There's a heating duct that runs right over the ledge so there isn't a lot of clearance to maneuver. I squeezed through the window, under the duct, and got to the floor. Then I had to walk across a pitch black basement to find the light switch. When I finally made it, I found that there was still glass inside the window, there were some strips of wood molding that had some small nails sticking out of them on the ledge, there was a small step stool on the floor, the recessed floor drain, and a bunch of laundry baskets.

I SHOULD have cut myself, got impaled with a nail, twisted my ankle from landing on the step stool and having it tip over, stepped in the floor drain and fallen forward, and tripped over baskets.

I didn't do any of that. I had faith that even in the darkness, I could find the right path and not get hurt.

Just a story I had to share.