The Winding Road

This freestyle essay came from the writing prompt: "Look at something around you in a new way." Here are the results. Other than typos, it was written as you read it.

I live on a hilltop. It is cold in winter, and we have a long, winding driveway that ices up and is slippery. In the spring, the melting snow creates streams of water that create crevices in it and the moisture causes the gravel to part under the weight of our car. In the summer, the carefully chosen and laid gravel cannot withstand the demands of the weeds, which grow up through it, even without the benefit of soil.

But there is another side to my driveway when I take a second look. It curves so delightfully, and gracefully, hiding our home from the view of the street. It is such a natural extension of the end of our long street, that tourists will often mistake it for the road itself, and drive up it, to be surprised by our house at the end. It is long, I say nearly ½ mile, or so it seems to walk it, and so it graces our entrance delightfully.

The weeds that grow all around it can also be called by another name: Wildflowers. After their ugly weedy starts, they display beautiful flowers that encase the auto’s travel, and mine as well, if I walked it. And if I walked it, I see a peek into our woods, and a patch of raspberry bushes, and a dining table for elves, leprechauns, and fairies.

I know, of course, that the huge rock table was actually put there by our “Country Wizard Extraordinaire,” Russ, who put in our driveway, but that is who actually accomplished this Herculean feat, with power equipment.

Who was the muse that caused him to decide that an outdoor dining table was needed in that spot? The elves, leprechauns, and fairies of course. They whispered into his ear that April day, and told him exactly where to set it: “Under that tree, just to the right, and put large boulders in front of it to the side of the driveway, to protect it from sliding cars. We don’t want to be disturbed by sliding cars while we dine…” They supply their own chairs until I can see clearly enough to know what to do: Put some of the wild ginger plants there, and let them make fine comfortable seating.

Blindness often invades me. Instead of fairy tables and wildflowers, I see weeds and ice. It is a blindness of a city person who has lost touch with her country roots. 

Let me be clear: I was born in Boston and lived in the city or suburbs most of my life, but I do have country roots when I see clearly. I spent summers in campgrounds and the ‘country’ with my father’s mother, with horses and chicken coops and dirt roads. 

And my deeper ancestral roots were in County Clare, Ireland, where the dirt was the kitchen floor as well as the driveway, and the large hearth with a peat fire cooked the food. With city eyes, I could see the poverty of thatched roofs and tiny windows and bedrooms. With my blindness removed, however, I could see the fine stone fencing that encased the ‘ladies garden,’ and the fields that kept the neighbor’s horses, and the complete enchantment of a land that Cromwell complained contained neither the water to drown a man, the trees to hang him nor the soil to bury him.

Clare did have a form of a Sunday promenade, the formal name of which escapes me, but a ritual of sorts that brought neighbors visiting other neighbors. They would come, and sit, and drink tea and catch up on the news: a baby that was to be born, a barn that needs to be repaired, the birth of a goat, a stubborn mule that knocked down a fence. These kinds of rituals aren’t done anymore by my Clare cousins. 

“Y’ don’t know if you might walk in on them when watching a favorite Tellie program…” 

And you can’t call them, because these cousins don’t have phones or the neighbors don’t, or both. 

They’ve gone blind, you see.

Down that driveway carries my car, and it speeds past the berry bushes, the wildflowers, and the enchanted dining table. As we whiz down the road, we also go by the river that actually bubbles and runs swiftly like its name, Swift River. 

I am blind in my car as I am watching the road or engrossed in thoughts that take me far away from the beauty of what surrounds me. I think only of the distance to travel to town, to be again in asphalt and heat and fumes from distant Ohio factories that settle in the Valley below me, and into the warmth that brings early flowers in spring, but the ungodly heat in summer.

It takes me only three days back in the city before the buildings seem all too close, the people too many, and the traffic too noisy. There, in this discomfort, I start to get a clearer vision. 

I see my driveway entrance, and my wildflowers in summer, and even the ice in winter that hangs like icicles on Christmas trees. I long for the long stretches of meadow in all seasons that show me, in winter, what the phrase “blanket of snow” really means, or why in summer, “make hay while the sun shines” is actual advice and not just a saying.

City people blindly cut grass short and put it into plastic bags to be picked up by workers in trucks, but here we grow it long before we cut it and roll it up for the animals to eat in winter. There is a chaotic loveliness to the country, a dirty practicality that tourists, like myself, years ago in Ireland, see as poverty or worse. 

There is a winding, careless, ‘you aren’t in control even if you think you are’ reminders in the country of just how vulnerable we humans are. We keep backup sand and shovels half way down the driveway for slide-outs, or black sunflower seeds later in the winter that serve as welcome-back bird food as well as traction. We keep carelessly piled wood that feeds our furnace if the ice kills the electricity. We have dirty dogs and dirt driveways, and weeds and bumps, that city people see.

But after three days in the city, I no longer see any of that. All I see, and all I long for, is the magic of the solitude and fairy tables and wildflowers that come with the long and winding road I call my home.