The Long and Winding Road

I drive a little less than an hour each way to and from work.  I get up earlier, I get home later, I spend a frickin mint on gas.  I don’t mind.  It’s a pretty drive.

 

The cross streets have names like "Payne’s Tavern Lane," and "Wagner Dairy Road," and "Jones’ Store Road,and (my favorite) "Crickett Hill."  Follow the winding gravel lane of Crickett Hill, and you will come across an impeccably kept double wide trailer, complete with front garden and cheerful seasonal flag – parked on about forty acres of green rolling fields and dripping emerald forest.  Would I trade my little house on a 1/3 acre lot for that double wide in the country?  Would I trade a house ten times my home’s size?  Yes, I think I probably would.

 

The oncoming traffic is a faded rumbling schoolbus, or a tractor with a ninety year old leathery-faced man in overalls who waves, or a semi loaded with timber.  Sometimes I get stuck behind one of these.  Sometimes that ticks me off, sometimes I just go with it.  Sometimes while I drive I listen to audio books, or to NPR to catch the news, or to bad pop music on the local radio station if I need to feel musically superior.  Sometimes I don’t listen to anything, but drive with the window down, turning from side to side to try to drink in every view.  (Sometimes when I do this I just I lose my focus, drift, and just about kill myself, but I’m getting better about it.)

 

There are ponds and farms, and it’s spring, so there are tons of baby things around.  Baby rabbits, baby birds, and a field of mama and baby cows, each with a stylish yellow plastic "earring."  Baby cows are pretty cute, and also remarkably limber (given they are the progeny of the cud chewing, glassy-eyed, heavy mother cows who don’t even bother to keep their eyes on them).  They skip up toward the fence at an oncoming car, and bound away once it passes.  In one spot there’s a row of crumbling wood structures that are each essentially a carport with a tiny room on top.  They look too old to have been built with cars in mind, and there are probably five of them in a straight line, in the middle of a field with no road leading to or from them.  Buildings like these; and the old two-story house that is essentially a roof and a few beams but has remarkable charisma; and the ancient Payne’s Tavern (for which the road is named); and a small stone house hidden behind a knoll that you can only catch a glimpse of when you breeze by at 55 mph; and dozens and dozens of others of places just like these make me want to be a local historian.  They deserve photos, and research, and some attention, and recognition for the purpose they once served, and the slightly different purposes they now serve (at the very least, they are soul food for me!).

 

It’s a good drive.  When I get to Sammy’s Barbecue, I know I’m almost home, and I wind my way through the old historic homes and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it historic downtown where I live.  A chic and fratty town is only a few minutes from here – a hustly bustly city is less than an hour.  But I like it in the country.  I think I like it a lot.