I've a peeling nose from overblowing, a full heart, and a swollen gland. I just finished my morning goal of writing two more chapters on my Maple Mullihan sequel (never mind the first book hasn't yet been accepted--a mere detail!) and I'm rather happy with the sunshine filling the whole of my window pane. I'm rather less happy with the rotten fish smell outside, but that's different mining-town Pennsylvania story altogether. I did want to share an account of my mystical drive to church yesterday while my gratitude for it is still fresh in my innards:
I left the children with Martin yesterday morning. With my travel cup of coffee and my materials for Sunday, a sandwich and pumpkin cookies in a crumpled paper bag, I left a screaming Elspeth and headed down the front steps. I'd been complaining a bit about making the drive by myself, especially as Martin seemed fabulously comfortable in his slippers, but as soon as I sat behind the wheel of our Subaru, I knew I was in for a happy time. I banished NPR, my usual background noise to the cacophony of children, for the silence that sat beside me companionably as I pulled out of town and onto the highway toward Morgantown, West Virginia.
The highway cuts in between rolling hills, which were once mountains of the western america magnitude, but are now comfortable and more like an old grandmama who is a bit saggy and droopy but all the more beautiful for the marks of her children, who have eroded all her sharp edges. Occasionally you spot a house on a ridge line or in a valley, and occasionally there's a blight, like a box store or a car dealer, but mostly there are just endless trees, curving upward and out until you find the horizon. The morning of my solitary drive, the sky was clear blue, the sort of blue that makes you wait for contrails and swooping birds.
The deep green and thrumming reds of our autumn seem to have burned away to give way to a golden blaze. As I drove down toward the edge of Pennsylvania, the maples burned on all sides. The trees seemed to have drunk up all the summer sunlight and were alive with gold. The maples were like a blast of music, ringing in my head, bringing tears to my eyes, when suddenly the road curved upward into a cloud.
All the singing hushed, and everything was white and soft and far away, echoing out on all corners of the road. I thought the mist would last only a few seconds and then I'd plunge back out into the color again, but it went on and on. I turned on my headlights. The cars around me slowed a bit. The mist moved through the hills and as I moved more deeply into it.
It wasn't until I was in West Virginia that I realized the fog was gone. I don't know when I drove out of it, but suddenly I noticed I could see the striated browns of the rock walls to the left of the highway. Shafts of water darkened the rock in solid waterfalls. Then it was out of the mountains back to the rolling color, the spheres of yellow and red, the flickering of leaves, the dipping of the road. I increased speed to that good old West Virginia pace--78 and curving through autumn, descending finally to my exit and to the university traffic and to the responsibilities of people and noise.
