Winding Roads and Clotheslines

So here's another short creative nonfiction piece I composed for our class blog. I said I'd wait till class was over but what the heck? I'll go ahead and share them as I go!

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It’s my dad’s birthday so my husband and I are meeting my parents and brother at our designated halfway point between home in Ohio and home in Virginia – Lexington exit 108. The same exit my husband had to take when he did his master's at Asbury. Every two weeks that first year he’d speed the three hours home, praying that he wouldn’t get caught behind a slow coal truck. It’d be a Friday night and I’d get off from play practice around 11:00 and head down the valley to his parents’ house, praying I wouldn’t hit a deer on the winding mountain road.

Those weeks seemed to drag along but Sunday afternoons came too fast. I’d drive through tears back up the mountain, watching his bumper in front of me, wiping my eyes so I could see. I’d drive him out of town, watching him leave the state, leave me, knowing he’d come take me away one day.

Six and a half years later and we’re married - no more winding roads, they're straight ahead for miles, stretching along fields and towns.  Our friends and family call us‘city folk’ now, living in Dayton proper where we hear sirens and cars and people nonstop.  When we drive home to Virginia it takes a while for our eyes to adjust to the pure darkness, we’ve grown used to the streetlights. But we can’t get away from them. Can’t get away from the noise, the constant movement, the constant pulse.

And here’s the part where people who’ve lived here their whole lives laugh because they would never call Dayton a ‘city’ or ‘city-esque,’ or maybe they would. I guess it depends who you ask. I sometimes feel like I’m a hamster on a wheel, driving I-675 every day to Fairborn, then Centerville, then back to Dayton, school, work, play.

. . .

We’ve made it to Lexington, met up with Mom, Dad, and my brother, we’ve eaten, visited, watched a movie, walked around a mall, not wanting to say goodbye. But we’ll see each other in another month, we remind ourselves. It won’t be like this last time when we’ve gone from Christmas to April.

It’s time to give the hugs and air kisses, the goodbyes till next time. And here it comes, the part that makes my gut knot, makes me glad we’re driving home in the dark so I can wipe at my eyes and not feel embarrassed.

“You take care of yourselves. Be careful up there,” Dad says, pulling me tighter into the hug. And I know he’s seeing that 8-lane road I drive everyday. I know he thinks about it more than he should. I know the image comes up in his mind when he’s spraying down the dusty coal road on his job.

This seems silly to some, but not to people who went nearly their whole lives driving on two- and four-lane roads. Even when we’d travel south for vacation in Myrtle Beach we were on safe four-lanes, comforting trees on either side.

We’re being called back there, pulled home. My husband's fed up with driving altogether and I tell him he could never do what I do everyday, merging and changing lanes, moving with the rest of the world to the places we're all going. I've become the city-driver and I critique him when we're out together. He's in the driver seat and he awkwardly changes lanes, waits for a green arrow, "You could've gone just now," I say as it turns red.

But then I've always critiqued his driving; the first time he took me home from play practice we sat at the light together, looking at each other's lips. I saw the light change out of the corner of my eye and said, "It's green, you can go." He laughed at me; this 15-year-old telling him how to drive. I didn't even have my learners' but I wanted to be the boss. He says he should have known a lot about me in that moment.

He jokes about getting a horse to ride to school everyday. I picture this in my head, they could put him a tie-post next to the Liberal Arts building and he could carry out a bowl of water between classes. He’s resigned to walking to work for now, but I know he’s not really joking about the horse. He told me the other day he wants to buy some birdseed to have in his pocket on his way to school; he can feed the birds like Francis. I think of the picture I bought him for Christmas - a black and white carving of a modern St. Francis in jeans and t-shirt, birds on his shoulders. I draw the line when he says he wants to start walking barefoot.

I can't be too hard on him though. I've recently discovered the spiritual significance of hanging clothes on a line. My favorite writer describes this simple physical act: "After a day of too much information about almost everything, there is such a blessed relief in the weight of wet clothes...Every time I bend down to shake loose a piece of laundry, I smell the grass. I smell the sun. Above all, I smell the clean laundry. This is something concrete that I have accomplished..."

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I've started hanging laundry out on our small balcony, hoping I can exchange the smell of fresh grass with potted plants.  It'll do for now, until we have land and our own clothesline in the grass.

Our 22- and 17-year-old selves shake their heads and say, “What the hell are you two talking about?” “People can change,” we say defensively. We’ve seen enough of the city, we need the trees, the mountains, the quiet. We need to look up at the night sky and see the stars. We need those winding roads, the coal truck that might slow us down.