yet another memoir, this time about changes.

Today we're supposed to blog about a life- or perspective-changing experience: something that altered what we knew about the world, or how we looked at it. Alaska was telling us about some of his big experiences, and he raised a point that really interested me: knowing versus experiencing.

You can know that there are certain things in the world, or that things are a certain way, but that doesn't necessarily mean you've experienced them. I think the point of this memoir activity is for us to talk about a situation where we experienced something that we already knew... so here we go.

My mother passed away when I was four years old, so I've known from a very young age that bad things happen, people get hurt, and sometimes they even die. But, like Alaska said, there's a big difference between knowing something and experiencing it. I knew from the moment I woke up and saw an ambulance in my front yard that people did actually die -- even people I loved more than anything else in the world -- but I didn't know until I was eight years old that I could die, too.

A big part of my family is made up of farmers. My uncles Mike, Bobby, and Bo are all part of a farming co-op, as are my cousins Tommy and Brandon and Brett. I've spent a whole lot of time at my Aunt Carol's battered old house and inside the ancient rust-colored barn, and it was there that I faced the big, looming, terrifying shadow of the idea of death for the first time.

It was afternoon, almost supper time, and Brett, Tommy, and I had climbed up into the hayloft. We liked to play games up there, swinging around on the rope that hung from the ceiling and jumping over the square feed holes cut into the floor. Sometimes, when there was enough hay down on the lower level, Uncle Mike and Uncle Bo would pile it all up and let us jump down into it. That's what we wanted to do that day.

(We didn't have permission to play our little jumping game, but we hadn't been expressly told not to play it, either. I guess the adults just assumed that we were smart enough to know that it's a bad idea to jump out of a second-story loft onto hard-packed earth without anyone over the age of ten around to supervise, and in that assumption they were wrong, because that's exactly what we did.)

There was some hay down there, not a lot, but enough to fool us into thinking it was safe. Tommy went first, which was typical for him, and landed right in the middle with a soft, crackly poof sound, perfectly safe and sound. Once he'd scrambled out of the way Brett followed, and again, it was perfectly fine. The middle of the pile flattened out a little under his weight, and a good bit of the hay dragged out behind him or stuck to his clothes when he rolled away, but he and Tommy declared that it was my turn and, trusting that they wouldn't tell me to jump if they didn't think it was okay, I took it.

I remember to this day how I took exactly ten steps back, the way Tommy always did, and how I pushed out with my back foot as it left the wooden floor of the loft. I went up and out at a pretty gradual angle--and then down, down, plummetting, rocket-fast, straight towards the ground.

The hay wasn't as thick or fluffy or safe for me as it had been for my cousins, and when I hit it -- hard -- it completely flattened, whooshing away from me, so I landed flat on my back with barely two inches of padding between me and the ground.

The first thing I registered was that it hurt, and the second thing was that, when I tried to suck in air and scream for my uncles, I couldn't. It was Tommy who fled, wailing at the top of his lungs, to the house and dragged his dad back by the hand. It was Brett who babbled through his tears what had happened.

It was me who lay on the ground, gasping, barely able to breathe and, because I couldn't even muster up enough breath to sob, unable to cry. I don't remember how long I stayed there like that. It felt like an eternity, but in reality it could have been as little as two minutes. I thought I was dying, but in truth I'd just had the wind knocked out of me.

When I finally got up, my Uncle Mike swept me into a hug and told me to never, ever do something like that again. Just like he had so many times before, he warned me that doing dangerous things could very well result in me getting hurt.

For the first time ever, I believed him.