My husband rarely gives up the steering wheel, but last weekend's road trip had me driving and his Dad riding shotgun while Ken napped in the back seat. It had been nigh fourty years since I'd been the one to drive that trail back to the town where Ken's folks first met as teenagers. His Pa is having a slow look-back of sorts as time starts to steal the B-Bs from his brain. Heck, it's stealing my B-Bs too. I'm just able to bluff a little better, for now. Even though it's April and the cicadas aren't out, it always seems like the bugs are buzzing louder along that route on I-20 east towards Augusta. It's hotter, lonelier, more desolate. There are miles of farmland, but few cows and fewer crops. Beautiful, old farmhouses dot the landscape and I wonder where the young people are going. Because they certainly aren't sticking around, though it is as pretty as a picture out there and the land is cheap, if you can get anyone to sell you a piece of it.
Ken's Mama died suddenly when he and his brother were babies, leaving a massive hole in the universe, a crater that never really healed. This trip was about visiting her gravesite, honoring what had been left quiet for a long time. Sometimes things are too difficult to face and they get stored away, but then the days turn to decades. We bought three small pots of flowers -- two of them little rosebushes and one of fresh daisies. Ken dug out three spaces in the hard dirt and watered them in. I prayed that God would bless those plants somehow, that they'd thrive without us there to look after them. It don't matter. It really was the thoughts that counted. And we thought about her, her Mama and her Daddy, all resting under there waiting for the Lord to call their bodies to meet up with their spirits in heaven someday. If you don't read the Lord's book, you might oughta.
A kindly man let us inside the church, the place where Ken's Daddy and Mama married, where his grandparents rose up to life and went down to death. There was no sallying forth to places unknown. It was down the road and back to town. A simpler place and time, and truthfully not much has changed even in the fourty years I've been coming here. After riding all over the countryside and reminiscing about many things, we met up with family and had a delicious meal and much talk. The goodbyes were prolonged and repeated. You never know if we will see each other again in this life, so you learn to not take those for granted.
The next morning, after a quick sleep at Ken's dear aunt's "town house" (no, it's not a condominium, it's a little house, in town), I felt like we were literally driving back through time. Away fell the fields, the old barns, the houses with their peeling paint, the glorious farms with their columns, tractors shedding their coats...gradually we encountered a car, then three, then more, then came Atlanta and its ribbons of lanes. We whooshed through and took Ken's Dad back home to Marietta. The time warp was over. When we pulled back to our old Victorian in Villa Rica, I felt drained, exhausted, overwhelmed. Life just keeps pulling. The past is sometimes like the signposts on the highway, whizzing right by. You look back and see them, wondering what the messages said. We need to pull off and walk, get out and read them, know them. I don't want to miss a thing.
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