I suppose I’ve been driving this route for some time now.
Ooooh-whoo. Seven fifteen a.m. every morning for the past one hundred years.
Perhaps I exaggerate just a tad–but you get the point.
I’ve taken this road in the pouring rain…
thick and spooky fog……
and slippery, blinding, icy snow.
Driven it before daylight savings time when it was so dark outside the streetlights were still on.
With all the windows down in the summer when the cooler wouldn’t work.
In the winter with blankets wrapped around our shoulders and heads and feet because the heater wouldn’t kick in.
Attended every football game, track event, and choir concert humanly possible.
Grumbled now and then about the caffeine-induced erratic drivers or teenage pedestrians with a “you-know-you-won’t-hit-me” death wish, and the ridiculous youngsters that really shouldn’t have a license in the first place—as we all converged here in this very parking lot—before any decent human being should even be out of bed.
Sat, crocheting in this holding space for hours at a time, doing that mama thing we call waiting, sometimes alone and sometimes while my beloved cargo spent some needed time…with their mom.
Sat, idling along with the car, staring at this tinted glass door–that far away one between the cars–looking for any sign of Daney boy, or the bald kid.
Oh, the laughing and talking and listening and teasing and heartbreaks and secrets and real earth life we’ve had at this place.
All to end up here. One. Very. Last. Time.
The bald kid thinks that I’ll be so glad to sleep in. He thinks that I’ll be relieved to save so much gas in the car. He’s sure I’m happy to see it all be finally–after 24 years and 5 kids—over.
I’m afraid he’s very…
very….
wrong.
And when that alarm clock doesn’t go off at 6:30 am any more, it won’t matter…
because I’ll already be awake…
wishing that it would…
just one more time.
Off to school—1996
Week 11 Food storage prompt:
10 lbs. sugar, 1 lb salt
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