The final growing together days take my breath away. We’ve slipped across half this vast continent while The Otter’s moving toward us from the other side. She couldn’t sleep the night before she left, and I’ve been up early every day, straining to proceed. Drawn to a strange combination of urgency and sanguinity, we keep moving while breathing in deep draughts of this late spring season. Lilacs and iris still bloom, nearly a month after their usual peak. Crops and gardens, barely established with a quarter of the normal growing season already behind them. The summer’s coming in slow motion, and we seem to cheat time as we move toward converging on the leading edge of it.

A geologic wrinkle runs the Eastern length of South Dakota and down into Northern Iowa. These hills mark the boundary between several generations of prehistoric glaciers, and that cloud we’ve been watching build since we left The Cities finally starts pattering the car with fat rain drops as we climb the Eastern edge heading due west. The resulting smell nearly overwhelms The Muse, who’s olfactory memory reminds her that she is coming home. Lightening arcs between massive n-dimensional clouds, and the road before us, bounded by two pothole ponds, looks like a glistening water channel in the fading twilight. The car floats us across.

The last seventy miles, we’re on county roads, and The Muse insists upon navigating if only to savor the place names familiar to most of her past. It seems she warns of upcoming tricky turns mostly to warmly remind herself of all her experience with tricky turns. Convergences sweep smoothly, even magnificently across broad distances, only turning tricky toward the final connecting time. Then, some fine tuning resolves remaining misconceptions into a definite connection, intentions into specific time and place presence.

We live on our intentions, but only thrive on our presences. Most of my life seems to have been spent on my way, and so very little in actual convergence, but the convergences seem nourishing enough to fuel enormous periods apart, as long as they hold the promise of coming together again. This late season holds that promise. The Otter and her dad must be nearly across Montana by now, passing through the bad lands, heading for the promised ones.

©2013 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: Granddaughter, grandparents, road trip