It was one of those days that invited you to explore. I’d finished my desperation shopping … translation: I’d run out of bread, eggs and ginger snaps. This does tell you something about the level to which my cuisine has deteriorated. Anyway, shopping done, I decided to take another route home, another road, one on which I hadn’t traveled in some time. While there were the inevitable changes and thoughts of “I wonder who lives in that house?’ I was drawn to other byways that I’d never traversed and so my exploration began on streets and later country roads that sung the song of autumn and discovery, an adventure so often lost as you get older and too busy with the minutia of living.
One road, apparently without a name, or at least a name that I could find, rambled through open fields, took wild dips through rolling hills and swept by a huge farm with numerous buildings, gigantic farm equipment and phalanxes of black cows. I passed by two fields of hops, row upon row of hops reaching skyward on their trellises, followed by hedgerows of sumac and rosa rugosa. I was in heaven … actually I had no idea where I was, but was sure that, at some point, I would wind up somewhere that I could identify.
I stopped for a while at a stream that ran under the road. I opened the car’s windows and took in the sights and smells of clear country air. I was back at my grandmother’s, standing next to the little stream that ran through the woods behind her house and across what we called the “back lane.” It was reminiscent of a something that I couldn’t identify then, without the experience or words to describe it … a respite from the pressures of life …even as a child. There is sanity in the wild even from the driver’s seat of a Honda.
Where do you go for that brief ‘time out?” Even retirement, as mundane as it can be, needs times out. Sometimes, assaulted by the limitations of health, a respite can be as effective as any medication. Finding even a small joy in the new, the unexpected, the absolute beauty of nature can be a tonic as are these automotive spurs of the moment explorations.
Apparently I need a lot of ‘go to’ places for respite. Outside of sitting on my porch with a good book, a favorite is my cottage, my camp, my simple rustic retreat with its bookcase, its woodstove and the peace made by the sound of the water lapping against the shore. I’m not sure what Zen is, but I do think that sitting in the big rocker on the porch and doing nothing but absorbing the scents and sounds of the place bring such peace and relaxation that if it’s not Zen, it’s close to it.
Travel to distant and exotic places may be the prescription for others, but for me, it’s the simpler corners of my life, unencumbered by pretense or guile, ordinary in every way, yet freeing from the hooks that hold me hostage to the must do and should do and the little bottles of pills that have become a limitation on who I am.
