on the road again
This week I’ve done a lot of driving. I drove from Michigan to Nashville, on a book promotional journey to MomCon. Once back in Epworth I drove to the airport and back to pick up my husband who flew in to help me close cottages and drive back across the country. We left last Saturday carrying in my daughter and son-in-law’s van all the books that didn’t sell and all the booth décor, plus our own luggage, two car seats for my grandsons, Cub seats from the old Wrigley Field before renovation and a painting that I’ve never been able to get home on an airplane.
We stopped in Pella, Iowa to visit one of Dave’s former college students and spent another night with a dear friend on her farm in Parker, Kansas. The next day’s drive was going to be a killer. I’ve complained about western Kansas, but really, Kansas isn’t as bad as eastern Colorado. They are both flat, but Kansas has trees and crops and some interesting little towns if you pull off the straight and efficient interstate highway. Eastern Colorado is a bleak slow rise to the mile-high city of Denver, before the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains envelops. There’s just so much more of Kansas, so it’s an easier target for complaint. But the sky was a picture-perfect blue with clouds that were so beautiful they looked fake.
When’s the last time you’ve been stopped by a freight train? On the drive to Michigan with my daughter and grandsons, we counted trains, but were only stopped by one, I think. In the Kansas countryside my husband counted 94 cars on this train as we waited for it to lumber past. It felt like it was crawling, but really it only took about a minute for all that freight to pass by.
Even with a little pillow that I reposition behind my lower back it’s hard to keep from stiffening up as the hours turn into days. I think about the long-haul truckers bringing all our goods across the country, taking short rest stops on the side of the road. I wonder if those Fed Ex trucks are carrying my packages that I shipped, the ones that I couldn’t fit in the car. How much I take for granted that is brought to my door or my grocery by a truck or a train.
In the sky over Denver the contrails of the jets formed a five-pointed star. Everyone’s going somewhere, just some of us are moving more quickly than others.
Love, Liz
