more normal than not

My son is getting ready to take and pass his driving test.

When he passes his test, he will get his driver’s license.

That’s amazing and terrifying.

My children are getting mighty independent.

Last night, we went out to do some night driving. We have to keep a driving log and one of the requirements is that we drive a certain number of hours after dark.  We drove all over the back roads around our house.  We drove up some pretty curvy back roads.  Up and down and around some very wiggly roads.  We zigged…and we zagged.

At night.  In the dark.

That was interesting.

Actually, most of the roads around our house are “back roads”.  When you live out in the country, all the roads are “back roads”….some are just more “backy” than others.  The roads we were on were the most “back” I could think of.

Before we left for our nocturnal adventure, I’d been repairing an entrance way door on the downstairs porch entrance.  The door was a cheap one when we got it….recycled/used…neglected by me and in need of some “fixin’ “.  So I was gluing and clamping and sanding and painting…seeing if I could resurrect it…make the entrance to our “airlock” a little nicer.

( I used to call that outside porch an “airlock”…people got a kick out of that…like that old door was a porthole or something….”hold your breath….we’re getting ready to go into the kitchen…you’re in the “airlock” now…you’re safe.” )

I suppose the word “mudroom” would have made more sense.

Anyway, I’d been working on the door so it was still up on sawhorses.

I’d forgotten to leave any lights on in that outer airlock mudroom…so when I got home, I sauntered in to the lower porch to flick the switch and get back to the job at hand.

The cat was up on the washing machine watching something.

I looked where the cat was looking…and it was something really furry and white…and black.  It didn’t really register at first exactly what this thing was.  I didn’t remember what kind of animal looked like that…black and white?  Furry?

Then I remembered…IT WAS A SKUNK’S REAR END!

I think that what I had going for me was that the skunk was as surprised as I was.  He was oriented to let me know of his “pre-scents”…but too surprised to really “do the deed”.

I liked that part of the story.

I don’t want to make it sound like I pondered any of this while it was happening.  It didn’t take me a long time to react.  I figured out what to do pretty quickly.

I backed out fast… tripped over and spilled the can of paint I thought I’d closed tightly,  ran upstairs and went in the top entrance, checked my shoes for paint when I got inside and on the nice new floor, got the flashlight out of the drawer in the bedroom, ran back downstairs, shined the light out of the kitchen window…

and realized that the skunk was gone.

I must have terrified surprised him, too.

I put the door back up before I went to bed….even if the paint was still a little moist.

It’s been raining hard here off and on for a couple of weeks.

Our driveway is gravel. Our road was gravel when we first moved here.  Most of the driveways in our area are gravel.

All this rain gives me a new appreciation for stability.

There is a lot of gravel in the road that shouldn’t be there.  There is a lot of gravel that’s washed down from everyone’s driveways.

Gravel is pretty heavy.  When you’re shoveling it you know that you’re moving something substantial.  It is hard to shovel gravel.

The kind of gravel we use on the roads and on our driveways is called “crusher run”.  It has a lot of fine gravel that compresses when you drive on it…forms a solid bed that way.

Crusher run is really hard to shovel.

But the water moves it all, little by little, until you wake up and you see that canyons have appeared where it once was smooth.

The water moves what it wants to move…and when it’s raining hard it wants to move our driveways down into the road.

I replaced the sway bar bushings on our minivan for maybe the 4th time since we’ve owned it the other day.  It’s not that I’m buying cheap bushings or doing the job wrong….it’s more a matter of it being a weird design that eats bushings like crazy.

I’m getting a lot better at doing a job that was kind of an “apprehension builder” the first time I did it.

Now it’s just an “irritation builder”.  It’s kind of a pain to do this job.

When I say pain, I mean literally a pain.

There is something horrible about trying to hold a 1/2 torque wrench about 6″ from your face while you back up the nut that can’t turn with a box end wrench…all the while, the gravel that I mentioned previously is digging into your back and skull even though you’re trying to stay on the square of used linoleum you lay down to protect yourself from the discomfort of laying on a bunch of sharp gravel. When you finish loosening that bolt….you have about 12 more just like it.

That’s just to take off the part that lets you do the rest of the job “easily”.  It’s hard to get to easy.

I was thinking this morning about people who get piercings or other “body augmentation”.  What a waste of money.

I carry divots all over my body for a week after I do some driveway mechanic-ing.  It’s not very artistic or cool…but I can definitely tell where I’ve been after I do a job on the cars.

It’s weird that something so substantial…something so heavy to move around if you’re shoveling or raking it…could act like it’s just sliding away when the heavy rains come.

It’s strange that something so solid could act like it’s just another part of liquid when the water gets ahold of it.

I don’t really understand a lot of spiritual things.  I guess that faith is what fills in the holes in my understanding.

I wonder if we aren’t kind of like a gravel driveway, though…moved by forces good and bad that we don’t understand or expect….moved little by little until we look behind us and see the ditches we never anticipated?

I know that I am moved…more and more… if I slow down long enough to stand in the “rain”.

I spent the last 4 1/2 years of my college life at a school in downtown Atlanta.

“Four and a half years?  What?! ‘Last part’ he says….how long did it take him to finish college? ” you may be thinking.

It’s a long story that I’ll skip for now.

It felt like a long story when I was living it.

This was a school that, like any school in the heart of a city, was mainly concrete…concrete….concrete…steel and glass.  It was urban.  It was urbane.

It was far from being the wilderness I had floating around inside my head.

I spent my summers working at a summer camp in North Carolina.  It was “out in the woods”.

It was what got me through the school year…thinking about getting out of the concrete and congestion, the hectic pace…and back to the mountains.

(We live down the road from the camp now…and after the highway department paved the road and I got more familiar with the area, it feels like a “suburb” of the nearest small town.  I guess that anything feels less remote when it becomes your home.)

This video is kind of funny.

It reminds me of some of the “totems” I had when I was waiting to get back up here….little things I could look at and remember friends and places I was anxious to see again.

People say “bloom where you’re planted”…and I guess we all do our best to deal with the task at hand.  Sometimes, though, the memory of someplace important to us is hard to forget.

It’s funny how small things like a campfire on your office desk can help you cope.