Taking off the blinders

I am about to escape the daily doldrums for a bit of spring weather and mothering in Florida. Probably the biggest thing I'm hoping for out of the experience is to relax and open my mind up to observations again. I have travel journals full of the things, but somehow I don't get much beyond the piles of waiting laundry and Abigail's cute antics to really look at the greater world around me. I haven't been hiking in years, and I feel a definite lack from just getting away from the rush of the world. So hopefully I'll find that soon, during the many hours on the interstate looking for landmarks and the shorter hour on back roads in Alabama. Brad and I will talk about them, I know, and hopefully I can get some time to put pen to paper as well (or cursor to screen).

I have always loved road trips. I still remember the homemade milestones as we drove down Interstate 55 between Chicago and St. Louis. There's something about driving for miles upon miles through flat cornfields that makes images almost iconic. There's the house on the left heading South with the swans in the small pond out front. Right up against the frontage road, not really even a farm. Just out there. There's the two-story brick farmhouse a bit further down on the right that never looked inhabited, like something out of a gothic novel -- or the house in "Santa Mouse." As a small child, one of my favorites was the hog farm with the cheery sunburst painted on the side of a shed, depicting free-range pigs and the slogan "Start Your Day With Pork!" After that came the tent company, with it's slogan spelled out word by word in tents "Tents -- Make -- Sense." Then the smokestacks signaling our approach to Springfield -- I always feel grimy, as if covered in a layer of soot, when I think of Springfield. And finally the flat flood plains of the Mississippi, veering away from the manmade canals, watching the Arch move along the horizon on the right, never really getting bigger, like an oasis shimmering in the Midwestern fields.

And the cornfields. Stretching along the shoulder of the road, alternating with soybeans. As a child, I didn't know of sinister subsidies or the insidious nature of corn syrup in the American diet. I just knew that when you let your eyes relax, the flashing lines of the furrows looked like running legs.

I haven't lived in the Midwest for almost 14 years, yet it tugs on my memory and my heart as home.