A Winter Roadtrip Comes to a Satisfactory End

After inaugurating the new year with ten days away from home, it's especially nice to be back, back in our still-chilled house with the minor toilet leak from the icy elements outside.

We spent two nights in Arkansas at Queen Wilhelmina lodge with a passel of relatives comprised of maternal grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins. From there we drove to Tennessee to stay at Dad's mom's house and also see an aunt and cousins. During that time we took a one-night trip to Berea, Kentucky for a college tour that, in my elated opinion, was excellent.

Now I am beset by strange homey feelings and urges to do impulsive homey things, such as plant a bulb garden, or sew a tunic, or putter around the kitchen, or buy a goldfish. Things one cannot do in a hotel or in one's grandmother's house. Not that I would normally plant a garden at home- and I've never bought a goldfish by my own initiative- but I feel oddly like doing so. I think it's the wrong time to plant bulbs. There is no room in my room for a fish. Maybe tomorrow, I'll start sewing before the impulse deserts me.

I did a fair amount of reading on the trip. Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, plus parts of a book on the life of Mohammed and another one by a man who bought a dilapidated zoo on a whim. Oh, and Donald Miller's newest book which is either called A Thousand Miles in a Million Years or A Million Miles in a Thousand years, I can't remember which.

I would have enjoyed that book more if I hadn't grown momentarily discontented with my life and spent an evening sprawled disconsolately on the perfect white hotel room bedspread grasping at scraps of emotional comfort from my mother. It ended when massaged her back and my little sister's and Mattie Kate massaged me back and we all felt better, and my hands still smelled like peppermint lotion in the morning.

Connor and I left this morning in one car and the rest of the family followed an hour or two afterwards in the other car. Sometimes I mourn the days of the minivan, but being in the car with Connor was fun too. I read three chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird aloud before he put on his new cd and we listened to music and talked here and there for the next five hours. By then I was over the I-Can't-Hike-Machu-Picchu-like-Donald-Miller-did fuss and was in high spirits. I even fell into the backseat while trying to retrieve a water bottle.

The afternoon shadows fell over the interstate through the wooded Mississippi area, icy gray shadows on yellow grass, on gray-blue asphalt. Yellow lines on asphalt. Sometimes ridges rose on either side of the road like the ones that line old stagecoach roads, and despite the interstate, the place felt old, 1800's old, like the Civil War could still be going on. And I thought about how glad I was that it wasn't, and about the sad and senseless loss of life.

Four hours from home we stopped in Vicksburg, at a welcome center on the Mississippi side of that great river, and from the hilltop watched the roiling brown waters sliding forcefully under the bridge. We admired the giant cannon from the siege that happened there during the civil war, and I was thinking about the siege on the Dneiper during WWII at Baliko Shechenko, and looking around the war monuments last year.

We crossed the interstate into Louisiana, and I felt glad to be even a little acquainted with a part of history, however sad. I always thought it was best to forget about the Civil War, a confusing morass of motives and passions and unreasonable attitudes about human life. But after learning a bit more history this past year, I think it might be good to remember more, and to understand the thoughts and actions that could lead to such a tragedy. Both the slavery practiced back in the 1600's and the natural consequences of slavery were tragic.

Suddenly, there was an outbreak of pine trees, and I knew we were close to home without looking at roadsigns. From Louisiana, to Texas, though a car wash, and then home we went, to our cold little house, a frantic cat, and a warm pork loin sent from our grandmother up the hill. Ah, to be home again.