The Road is Calling

Folks - I had two drafts of this up, same story, different pictures, one I published, the other still in draft. I went to delete the one I thought I did NOT use, and deleted the one with your kind comments. Sorry about that. - B

Somewhere far away - and years long past. Overhead, a sound passing by, the somnolent gnashing crunch of tires meeting gravel, the sound moving away, dying away, not to return. From somewhere close, a deep sigh within her, or the wind in the trees, shivering stalks against the sky. There have been tears, but they eventually slowed to a quiet seeping of dreams against a pillow in the night, muffled resignation, undetectable during the day. Days that grow round and monotonous, life slowing to one of quiet acceptance.

The decision to leave is sometimes made for you by fate, sometimes carefully considered, the idea tossing and turning each night in your lonely bed. Considered as life goes on as if nothing happened, as if all the years you spent here meant nothing to the world outside. She watches and listens, for what she does not know, as the vines creep against the house, growing wild, overflowing the heart, constricting it.

But life does go on. Chores that won't wait, the smell of oak, smoked fire already burning, the instructions that someone once gave her, how to penetrate the honeyed wood, its core as hard as iron, the axe aimed down, straight to the heart of the knot. The words burn in her, and as the wood falls apart into quarters, she feels the words as a hand against her back, a feeling lingering across her shoulders, down the arms that whisper their own aching promise.

As she holds the axe she thinks, "I know how to do this", surprised, given how long she'd been doing it, that she could do it on her own. Small victories indeed.

She could run the John Deer to feed the cattle, deliver a breach calf in the middle of a storm. She had learned to do a lot of things out here to survive that she never intended to, now ready for someone else to take up that job. The barn had become a hiding place, these daily chores the tithing of the soul. She put the tractor away for the last time, the air crisp with cold, brushed with the scent of kindling alight, dense with longing, just waiting to be breathed in deep. As she leaves the barn, she does not look towards the house, she looks towards the road.


Leaving is the easy part. But like any decision, the hardest part is to simply make it, and it's often a lot easier to make in the clear mornings of a winter day, when you find the answer lies in what you need and the compromises with which you can live. You take what remains that brings you joy and you move forward.

One stays because you remember the good parts, the memories of sheer moments of discovery, of youthful first love, sweeping to the corner, the later moments of pain that shattered like glass on the clean surface of your life. It's enough for a while. Till one morning you wake to the sounds of the blues. Wake to sound of the wind against the eaves, flush with dreams, your body alive in a tangle of sheet. Not quite remembering the particulars of the dream but just the feeling it imprinted on you, as you breathe in wakefulness, bringing it back. Dreams of longing, of desire, fleeting things, reflections in a river, seen for just a second, then swept away in the solitary stream that is your life now. For it seems you can hardly remember what it was like when you felt that way. When you loved, with urgency, with pressing need and were loved in return. Then something, just a simple sound, touches the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and quick as fabric against your skin, as soft and fleeting as a birds wings against your face. And you remember.

The cattle since sold, the music still plays as she eagerly leaves the house, no chores left to do. The dog follows, nose to the ground seeking something with an integrity, that as a human, we can only admire. The air is cold. Clear. Sharp. Cutting as a knife to the landscape, flayed and laid bare to the eye under the surgical light of a New Years morning.

The cold restricts movement, as it propels it, pushing us towards something that will warm us.The cold, like life, only accentuating that which we can not sustain. You move forward or you will die.

While they walk, she talks to him, and the old lab pretends to listen. Talking of the future, of possibilities. But speaking of it out loud seems banal, like proving a right angle or finding the equal distance between two different lives and the air grows silent but for the echo of music from the house following them into the fields. Fields that clutch onto the skeletons of crops that long ago died, miles of bare, windswept trees, and clusters of burrs that stick to everything with a tiny pinprick of pain. Things were sticking to her. Would she just be able to brush them to the ground.


She spent all those years in college only to end up living a Green Acres like existence on this piece of earth. Could she go back? To the intense clarity of a career. To noise and focus and politics and people. To herself?

There will be a patch of land, it just won't be this one. Those that earn the unspoken name of they who tend the land know what hard work is, and elect to it anyway. They care for, with spoken ambivalence that one shining thing, that which they can hold in their grasp. A handful of soil, the textured hide of a suckling calf, even as they are still on occasion drawn to the manifold richness of a world far away from all this.

The rising sun ducks behind a small layer of fog as a tear wells up to the silvery humming edges of a blues song drifting on the wind as the sun finally breaks though the leaden Southern sky. Her arms are cold. She looks down at her hands; hands that used to pulse pink with the life of someone always searching for truth, before this. Hands now that simply write checks for a life that's long been overdrawn. Hands pale, as if the blood that coursed through them has all gone to the heart to sustain it for it has no other nourishment. She could hear the branches in the wind and the faint music from the house, accompanying my solitary labored breathing and the rustle of her clothes. She felt as if she'd run for miles to get here.

It's not been an easy decision. There's going to be debt, the little that's owned can't be sold for what it's worth. Today the thought of just calling the people up North who offered a job, gathering up her things and driving away, lures strongly, normally driven back by a guilty conscious. The thoughts that kept her There's the house, there's friends. But the house is mortgaged to the hilt to pay for the business losses, and friends? Well you find that when life goes to hell that many friends blow away like the leaves across the landscape.


There is nothing to keep her here any longer. There is no guilt to smother the hope. Hope that stands out like the open road ahead of her. Leave? Why the heck not?

The music is still on the wind, even if the ears can no longer hear it clearly. The blues, a cadence of sadness moving slowly forward, with that momentum of a blues sound, awakening something within, the contemplation of life going forward with nothing but the sound of a mournful guitar. The sun's finally shown its face, the notes of another song within her calling it out, the bass notes the draw of a slanting sun that mellows her like good Jameson Whiskey. The lab wags his tail in anticipation of something he can't yet see but senses. Something that only he can hear.

She's going to leave. Tomorrow? Today, before one more dawn illuminating an empty life. There's a truck in the carport that will hold what is left. Inside the house, the sun glints off the keys hanging on an old cupboard in a kitchen that's cold. Somewhere soon there will be a new kitchen, ripe with the smell of baking bread, the bite of a single cherry, juice agains the lips, the swallow of rich liquid.
"No one knows the trouble I've seen" she sing along, but it's with the faintest glint of a long forgotten smile that still can peer out from behind a cloudy countenance with the sound of a good song. Not the blues, the clear sweet music of a guitar. A solo. Sometimes you can't hear the music until you play alone, the notes, a melody that leads you back to yourself. Sounds and tastes and touches you think you'd forgotten. She's got that music in her soul, and knows what to do, following the music back to the house. John Lee Hooker singing now.

"I'm leaving, leaving
I'm going back down the line, down the line. . "

There's enough light to pack. With the few remnants of this life she'll hit the open road. That old truck carrying them to forge a new life, of tears of joy, and years later, looking back, a laughter she'd not known since youth. The music on its CD player will not be the blues, but the sounds of joy, of lilting, rhythmic memories of freedom.

Soon, the truck is loaded up, above, the trees singed with frost so that each branch was delineated, each individually beautiful, alone.

When people first settled this area they built their houses out of these old trees and did what they needed to do to live. And when they found themselves cold and hungry, they moved on, but only after they burned down their houses to get their nails back.

Into the car, some cookbooks, a a framed picture or two, a wedding photo, there discovered in a box. From that simple object, held in her hand, welled up within a nail stab of pain that stayed in corners of the soul like cobwebs that no one could reach, small strands of loss visible in darkness and in day. She removed the picture from the box, looking at it clearly there in the crystalline air of a winter morning and wondered why she had kept it.

She had learned to love it here. The history, the honest ruggedness of the people that passed through or settled there. She liked exploring old museums and stores where you can still find treasures someone dropped off their covered wagon as they crossed through the State on their way West. In one store West of here there's a beautiful old piano, abandoned along the wagon trail. She had read about it in a story once, how it was left, keys baking in the heat, and how the woman who played it was buried and left in a small tender grave marked only with a seat of a broken chair and a rock.

There are dozens of graves like this on the wagon trails, in deep grass and in low open spaces of land. Nothing left but some stones and a wooden cross, the gloss of light on its surface, and shapes of long forgotten shadows on its bark. And with them, those solitary crosses, were left the remains of household goods, bulky memories too big or too cumbersome to take the rest of the journey. Yet the pieces found in the museums didn't look as battered as you expect, as others came and collected them. They appeared almost as if they knew their place in the world and in the grand scheme of things they were where their destiny meant them to be, left in the tracks of the wagon, until someone recognized their worth and laid claim to them.

Perhaps that is why she kept the photo, a reminder of not the tears, but the journey.

The vehicle now ready, she took one last long look at the cattle at the neighbors, their shapes leaking away in the fog of their own making, sweat and breath in an evening chilled as steel, their forms becoming insubstantial as shadow as they drew in together for shared warmth. They paid her no mind, turning their backs to her as others did when she made the decision to pack up what was left of her heart and leave this place.

She got ready to drive away, looking at her eyes in the rear view mirror through the cloud of breath, rags of ice hanging off of the grill, that would fall to the ground when she slowly backed out of the drive. The sound of gears in motion would echo across that country road which was her address for eight years, orange brake lights flashing a semaphore greeting of departure as the headlights pointed north.

She took the wedding photo and walked back to the empty house, leaving it on the mantle. The stars were cold as she waved goodbye.

The road is singing to her, it's time to go.