Thursday, June 12, 2025 "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' With Lovin' On Your mind."

   ... by Loretta Lynn, I was thinkin.'  I had the radio on.

 

   Dark threatening storm fronts began to heave themselves over me mile after mile faster than wet woven rugs slapped on fleeing mice during a summer cottage opener. Gale-force winds slammed into me from the northwest and pummeled the towering oceans of green-leafed trees into huge rolling waves of tumultuous frenzy accompanied by horizontal & vertical rain so strong that it peeled the paint off the car, stripped the doors of weather-stripping, and flooded the floorboards right down to the frame, all aflexin' as it was; good thing thars holes in 'er, otherwise my feet'd git wet.

 

    I wisely set the wipers to 'Fookin' Fast' just as it blasted the windshield so loud that those to whom I was talking on my cellphone heard it and worriedly queried, "WHAT'S THAT NOISE? ARE YOU DRIVING THROUGH SAND??"

     The wipers cleared my view a zillion times a second, helping me deftly steer, white-knuckled, at 55-65-mph, through water-filled wheel-ruts on the curving, rising, falling, asphalt surface across gravel-sprayed intersections with forest roads, as dozens of sleek wild-eyed, rain-soaked-hided deer shot across in front of me as flashing brown-orange-gray blurs grazing my headlights with their white tails stretched out behind them so far, they rattled my side-mirrors in their wake.

 

     My god! I hadn't driven in driving rain and wind like that since June 2nd, this year when I tardily left Roseau County for Beltrami County, at 3 o'clock, to visit Wannaskan Almanac writer Jackpine Savage with whom I had an appointment at 2:30.

 

    Forest tree debris from a previous storm lay prostrate in shallow ditches and protruded intrusively into the narrow gravel road I was driving. Semi-fallen trees leaned precipitously against one another overhead, just whispers away from disengaging and falling KERWHOMP! on unsuspecting passersby. 

 

   Wisely, I videoed portions of my trip so my wife would believe me.

     

   The reason I was out there at all by myself, on that latter stormy afternoon of all afternoons, is because my wife let me go on a long-time-comin' solo road trip to Prior Lake, Minnesoter. Although we had planned this trip for weeks, my wife had begun to suffer a tooth ache, atop her other discomforts following a fall in our home a couple weeks earlier. She admitted sadly, she just wasn't up for the trip and was going to stay home. Since it was our youngest granddaughter's 5th birthday, she said I would have to make the trip alone.

 

    "Wipe that smile off your face," she said.  "You literally lit up at the prospect."

 

    I doubt that I 'literally lit up' about anything concerning a long-over due two-day solo road trip in the recently seriously-serviced 1998 Subaru Legacy Outback. (I may have thought about 'Lighting up,' but as a very-longtime married friend of mine told me years ago, (infrequently, I might stress) there's a time to smile and a time to remain stoic when gifted a blessing of some weight known only to yourself. Stay cool, etc, etc. Don't blow it.)

 

    Admittedly, I was out of practice. It'd been so long a time since I had driven a few hundred miles all by myself, that my 50-something step-daughter asked her mother if it was safe for me to do it. 

 

   I was aghast.

 

    "How old does she think I am?" I asked her mother. "Ancient?"

 

    "Aye, perhaps I is, matey. Perhaps I is."