Driving down old lanes

I was thinking how I never really write anything. We were driving past the place where Joy once lived, where she raised her kids. Woods just past the house -- maybe she once walked in those and then they sold the woods and she stopped walking -- or it might have happened the other way around.

I held my first circle in her house when I didn't even know that's what it was. We circled deosil, went backward in time and found words, wrote our childhoods. Miss Margie forgot to write Jesus poems and Illa Jean stretched her 4-line limit into a two page sudden fiction.

Everything was so innocent back then.

We had all this time. We could spend hours writing a line if we wanted. We filled notebooks -- all of us. Me and my girls spun ink across lines until the pages breathed.  I have these poems stapled together to prove it. We were Zennish. There was that moment. The past lived in it and the future leaned over to look across our shoulders at it -- but we were in the moment. We didn't have to save them up or cherish them -- there were more where that came from, honey.

I was in the backseat as we drove past Joy's old house. Honey and his Mom, who we'd just rescued from old folks jail were in the front. I remembered, suddenly, how kids survive all the nonsense parents do. I remembered (vaguely) how to daydream. I wished for music to drone out the old woman telling the same stories over and over again in the front seat. Honey had drifted out, zoned in on math and maps and other work-related distractions, had a vague look and so, was coping the best he could. She'd started this story again about how she ended up in old people's jail, Golden Living something-or-other, where they made her wear an ankle bracelet and work puzzles. It was one of five or six stories set on continuous loop.

Just before I slipped into a pain induced coma the monotone up front was sending me into, I remembered that there was such a thing as daydreaming. I had forgotten. Haven't used that survival skill in years. Every child knows how to escape time and place and go somewhere else, but I'd forgotten.

The weather went all wispy and took a chill into it and suddenly it was possible again. There are hills the mappers didn't find, hollows where time stopped, people who talked the way we once talked in childhood's childhood. There was no religion because no one had to believe anything. Everything was. The end. No need to explain it. We all played in the sunlight without thoughts of ultra-violet rays and in the rain without thoughts of taking a chill and in the snow without believing in frostbite. That's not at all what I mean to say. Once you say it, it's defined and then, that isn't it. That place doesn't define itself. It's a cricket and katydid kind of place. Whip-o-wills call and twilight is so holy, no one thinks to ruin it by calling it holy.

Maybe I can't write it. Maybe I can only daydream it. But that's a start.