Windows
When I was a girl, it was rare to find a home with an air conditioner. For one, the technology for home air conditioning wasn't what it is today, and what was available was expensive. When we lived in the foothills of northern California, air conditioning was provided by ocean breezes through the pines. In Dallas, our school had large round metal fans that roared above the squeak of chalk and the voices of our teachers, but did little to do much save send loose paper from our Big Chief tablets soaring across the room. On summer nights, my mother sprinkled the sheets of our beds with water in a repurposed Coke bottle fitted with an aluminum top, and pointed a box fan on full tilt across the bed. As the water from the damp sheets evaporated, it cooled our bodies enough to sleep.
My favorite time of the year was when I could open the windows and fill the room with the sound of crickets, the smell of honeysuckle and cut grass in the summer, and in the winter, chill the room so that an extra quilt tucked over my head made my little nest a haven. Last night was one of those nights.
I'm hoping to take the second part of this year's "Big Trip" in a couple of weeks to see Lake Huron and the west coast of Michigan as the colors appear. September and early October are good months for most of the States as the land is in transition. This morning I'm in a quiet, shaded camping spot in Crabtree Cove on Lake Stockton in Missouri on a shake-out trip with Dakota. Walt suggested it and, of course, I had thirty-eleven excuses why I needed to stay home and tend to things that really didn't matter much. I don't know why I do that, really, because once I'm settled into my camping spot, those worries vanish. The world keeps on turning without me, and in my head, I know this. And at 72, the window to smell honeysuckle in someplace I've not been before will close soon enough, and whatever I'm telling myself is so important that I stand rooted in that narrative will be there when I get back. What suffers are the stories.
Dakota, knows nothing but that the creak of the doors on my 26-year-old van means new smells. A forest of friends to greet her each morning. Shadows moving outside the windows as the sun sets that could mean danger, or could just mean discovery.
We're heading home in a bit. The roads in this part of Missouri are as old as the box fan from my childhood and so we'll take it slowly through farm lands laden with the smell of cut grass and raw Earth with the windows open to whatever we find along the way home.
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