Meandering Thoughts (#26)

Hey, was it talking about today's road trip?

This fortune arrived back in October.
Does that mean I have to wait until next year?

I last blogged on October 6th. Before that, September 1st. Between then and May 31st, there was nothing. Yet, I refuse to give up. When it comes to achieving a goal, a little something, is better than a whole lot of nothing. So, after driving around this morning, I started my laptop, and wrote the following. It's messy and bloated, like my mind right now. 

County highways, and country roads, on a mid-morning in autumn, alone with my thoughts--what could possibly go wrong?;

 

Overhead, alternating dark blue and light gray folds feinting a rain that won't arrive, today; 

At least two abandoned railroad crossings, and one that's still working;

A mental health clinic, beside a mountain preserve;

A sprawling high school campus made of brick and solar panels, surrounded by a vast sea of wild grasses--a moat (whether to keep out reality, or to lock up the youth, I dare not say);

Here a huge barn house, there a short silo--both newly renovated (containing what, I do not know);

An old town USA gentrified two decades ago, filled with Kobe beef sliders with a side of vegan dessert, and primitive stoneware retailing for thousands of dollars (the local Wawa and Starbucks are outside of town, five miles down the road, just in case you needed to be grounded);

(Once, years ago, in mid December, on my way to another lost chapter of my life, I witnessed a ghost. He was a six-and-a-half foot tall bearded man, lanky, slightly hunched at the shoulders. And he was walking along main street. Seeing him jarred my memories, and sent chills through my soul. I had known him, speaking perhaps no more than two dozen words to him through the course of my teaching career.  But the deeper shivers were reserved for the other figure, a willow-wisp of a girl stepping about like a newborn fawn, in the shadows stretched long behind him. She and I shared many a conversation over quite a few years. And she left this world way too young.);

Suddenly, a fork in the road: one takes me back to a job I once held, a lifetime ago, and the other returns me home, to the present (yet, both are bleeding nostalgia);

Steepled churches, one no larger than a garage, barely holding on to the moment; another tall, stout, and bright white, as if to fight against insignificance; a third, with a sign, with a hokey meme, an attempt to remain relevant;

Rolling fields of corn carcasses and muddy tracks, interspersed with million dollar homes, a remote car mechanic, and a tavern that is so out of place, I wonder if it's not a front for illicit activity, except that the sign brazenly proclaims its existence;

   

Then, an enigma: a small, short, squat building thrown down in the middle of a field, like a stone cube dropped from the sky, and a local (or, perhaps an outsider), decided to carve two large rectangular windows covered over with bars on each side of the house, an entrance, a story above the ground, with two stairways running parallel to the face, and a facade of brownish, grayish, blackish hues, as if to render it ancient and abandoned (for twenty years, I have passed it, and it still remains a mystery, and a fascination, for me--this time, planters filled with red leafed trees adorned the steps);

Yet another road, branching off from the main thoroughfare, that once bore fresh berries, but since has dried out and withered away (okay, I am really twisting these metaphors--time to return to the present);   

And the one moment, that repeats itself every time I travel along this route: the backroad cresting a  particular hill top, breaking through the forested canopy, revealing from such a height, miles and miles of folding undeveloped land nestled between me and the range of wooded mountains stretching along the horizon (each passing of that spot evokes the same emotions, but I lack a label for them). 

Finally, I am back home, bursting with thoughts that require unpacking.  

(All this while running an errand to a community center, fifteen minutes from my house. We had two Costco-sized bags, and less than twenty trick-or-treaters.  So, I was donating the leftovers. The drive home took me an additional thirty minutes.)