Fragments From Floyd

Digging Out

I was proud of my packing. Each bin and box was filled with orderly stacks, rolled slacks and folded T-shirts, computer and writing tools, snack foods in opulent excess (Ann helped me pack and she has lifetime membership and a leadership position in Overpreparers Anonymous). As I drove along the hiway south toward Brasstown, I could find my slightest whim for music, munchies, what-ever, at my very fingertips without even looking, a fully actualized free spirit. A passerby would have seen me gyrating in my close confinement, seen my lips move and my fingers beating rhythm on the steering wheel:

"keep me searching for a heart of gold (beat beat beat)... and I'm growin' old"...

I'm was not sure what I was searching for by taking this week away from home. But it felt right. I pretty well had my shinola together going down to the Folk School exactly a week ago today. I was organized, energized, and oh-so-well equipped. I had a ream of blank paper, countless reams of RAM on my borrowed laptop, and was heading toward a week of... I wasn't sure what I'd have a week of, and I had made up my mind to avoid expectations. I was just going, travelling hopefully, wailing Neil Young wide open on the open road. Life was good!

My first hour traversed forty miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway where I owned the road. The Leaf Peepers have scurried back south for another year, and I could lolligag or zip along at 55 as I chose. At every bend, radians of autumn sun sprayed combed yellow light through forest ridges ahead of me. The sumac were spectacular in their calligraphic wisps of scarlet, mucronate leaflets like practice strokes, upturned so slightly at the tips. I should have stopped for a picture but this was a time of motion. There is some magic in being alone in a car going to or coming from a far place as the sun rises. More, perhaps, in going to. It was this sensation of sailing, of discovery, of vastness that held me, bore me along as I climbed down from BeanStalkLand into the Piedmont of Virginia and crossed the line into Carolina.

I may have more to say later about the trip down. I bring it up now only because of the contrast I see of my earlier togetherness of my shinola to the disarray I face this morning -- both in my jumbled stacks, rumpled slacks and crumbled snacks, and of my thoughts and memories of the week that now drift farther, farther into the deep space of memory like a skywalker untethered, moving with outstretched arms toward the vanishing point.

My natural tendency is to put it off for a few days. Unpacking is a melancholy chore, but I should do it this morning. But I'll be back. Did I mention that it's good to be home?

Posted by fred1st at November 9, 2003 06:14 AM | TrackBack