“It was a mad dash, but I made it. The prognosis was harsh. I’d figured I needed a new truck battery, & wipers, but the projected $700+ to fix the gas gauge hit me hard. It’s a blessing I’ve learned to ride the waves of “money in, money out” without being overly sentimental. I don’t take it personally anymore, & have aged out of the manipulations of a local mechanic who did me right, as long as I put up with his advances. I no longer have the luxury of such services, that ebbed and flowed upon favors, as mild as a smile, or at their apex, depended on my mild acquiescence to things I disliked. Being poor isn’t great, but it isn’t the end of the world. I’ve moved on from that, because I could. I know I’ll have cash for the float, in the gas tank, that failed, and I’ll be able to sit in a warm waiting room, with internet, while it’s fixed. I’ll be happy to wake up early Monday next week, & come back at the crack of dawn. It’s easier, than it was. Making decisions based on what I don’t have, and what I won’t be getting anytime soon, was a burden. But it got a family raised, and my heart skips a beat, to know how well my children turned out. Repositioning myself into the comfortable bucket seat of my 2017 Chevy Silverado, I feel the freedoms of age, and the hard knocks behind me. I work for myself now, and only have to get to the tax accountant’s office, by 3:30, to sign my 2021 tax returns. It’s a typical slog up Route 7, to find my obscure ranch house destination, beating my thumbs on the steering wheel, behind the fuel trucks and anonymous sedans of suburbia. Much of the farmland is gone. The glimpses of Lake Champlain, still arresting, take me back to mixed feelings, of when my life lay before me, as the chase to find my own place in the world, & those desperate longings to be wanted and found by someone who was someone, were acute. Well, now I know. Now I’m the someone, I’m the ground I wished to stand on, and I only want to model peaceful coexistence, & an unmanaged code of conduct. Leave me alone, and I will populate a quiet corner of the world, with lack of constraint, and a passionate, loving care for all who venture in. The sky is still a ferocious reminder of forces over which, we have no control. So I marked the road untaken, many times, and circled back. Today, as I passed the western outlet of “Church Hill Rd.”, I crafted my return to find out what it was that I’d been missing. Just a road, just another way home. But if we don’t seek the unknown, the unknowable, the untrodden ways, we are lost. I’ve never shed my desires, or curiosity, to drive on every road in my territory. No matter how subsumed by development, or marred by big box stores, & sprawl. I still know that things hide in plain sight. And that when things seem most oppressive, most obvious, most manipulated, even psychopathically twisted, there are beings living in and among, and doing the same thing as I am. That sliver of the lake, the trailer park behind the tax prep ranch house, the old neighborhoods oddly undisturbed by everything callous & arrogant, the nests of birds, the laundry ropes hung with diapers, and working pants, the lanes where lives go on, and vibrantly, without modernization blurring any of their beautiful cogency. That could have been my home. The musician I dated who went on to fail his genius, and die of an overdose. The impromptu jam sessions we sang into, striving to be heard, if only by each other. I remember it all. On dull streets, in boring cul-de-sacs, between microwaves, and piles of dog shit. It was where we started trying to join our life. And then split, and fractured, and normalized and left each other behind. So now, is the now. In the coming darkness, I turn the dial to full on 4WD. My rapture isn’t about dying and going to heaven, it’s about pulling a truck with new wipers around the last turn, into silence. Getting out, noting ice forming, in drops on the wind shield, and the dead sound of one stream not yet frozen. The bigger mountains don’t say anything or give anything, without a fight. They just loom, lording over the outliers. Where, I guess, I’ve staked my claim.”
