A driveway is really just a private road. There's plenty of coming and going in a lifetime, and it could be only a practical thing...but it's really so much more. I think of our land, when we first looked at it in 1996. It was so thick with brush and trees on the front side, you couldn't walk through it. We had to circle around the back just to get to the house site. We brought chain saws and machetes and hacked a trail from the road. It was then that I began to realize what we were in for. We worked and sweated for a few days and it was still little more than a walking path. Eventually a tractor was hired and the real muscle was applied. I remember shouting and jumping up and down when that machine started moving. Since he was already there, I had him whack down the front part so we could have a pasture. Ken never forgave me for that. All that front field ever did was erode and look sickly.
We paid for trucks and trucks of gravel. I never knew there was so much skill involved in laying a strip of crushed rock. Then there came the day when we moved onto the property in our camper and we started using that blessed, 400-foot driveway. Ken and the boys laid out an area to be paved, with three parking pads. I thought it was ridiculous to have that much concrete. It looked like a runway. Ken reminded me that all these kids would one day be driving. I didn't want to think about that part. Then there was that time the menfolk sawed a failing, 50-foot tree and landed it straight onto the pavement (and not on the house). My brain has all these memories of life lived on that place. I see our kids playing monkey-in-the-middle and some kind of baseball-related game in the driveway, always with much yelling and running. There were years and years of basketball games. They would adjust the basketball goal so they could dunk and I would hear loud thumps reverberating off the walls. Each child had an epic story in that driveway. Our oldest, Jon, was running full-tilt down it when one of our 100-pound Golden Retrievers intercepted, causing him to crash and scrape his hip and elbow down to the bone. Our second-born, Daniel, decided to race his Pa down it (Pa was driving the car. Daniel was running), slipped on the gravel and got his leg run over. Try explaining that to the emergency room doctor. Miraculously, he was (mostly) okay. Our third-born, Jesse, hitched a ride, grabbing onto a ladder that was extending out of his Pa's truck, only to get bounced high in the air and into space when the truck skidded onto the concrete. The law of gravity prevailed. Then there was fourth-born Liz, who had the misfortune of backing over two of our animals. Don't ask.
I think of the joy of coming home from somewhere, children running out with laughter and smiles to greet me. Pa always talked about the way it felt to pull in there after a long day at work, how he could breathe once he turned off the road. In the end, it wasn't about just that house, or that property, or that driveway. It was about a place called home, where you could be ugly and still be loved. Somewhere, where you felt safe and knew that the earth was going to keep turning. Not everyone's home is like that, but I pray that some way, somehow they can find that place. In this life or the next.
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