Drink Up All

 

How many times have I traveled this road as it bends and curves? Enough lately so I dare to look around and let the Journey carry me.

It downshifts itself to climb. Carmine and golden hills surround me. I’m in ski country. My dad says this road was once an Indian trail that led from Petoskey to Alpena.

Gray clouds billow and puff around the sun.

Yellowed leaves flutter down to join their piled browned siblings as the trees, that’ll soon be just grey skeleton sentinels in the snow, continue to disrobe.

I slow for a rafter of wild turkeys that amble across the pavement.

A hawk perches high on a wire next to the road’s shoulder.

I stop to snap a photo of a concrete shell, emptied of life.

A profusion of wagoned and winding color demands photos.

I drink it all up.

 

 

 

Then from the top of the next rise, the windshield fills with a view of the the bay that stretches to Lake Michigan that stretches past the horizon.

I know it’s coming, but it always makes me gasp.

I turn Shaun Groves up even louder until the music and his voice vibrate in my chest.

Hush away the hurry
Put to rest the worry
Come to quell and quiet me
In this moment given
Slow and fully live it
Drink up all the passing peace

Awake my soul to live this moment
Awake my soul,
 give thanks and hold it
Dear now
God is here now
Awake my soul.

The Journey knows the way.

I pass the clinic and the hospital on the left, drive parallel to the bay, stop at the light and waver between a left turn into Kilwins for ice cream or a right turn toward the yellow cottage.

I turn right.

This time.

I’ve cranked this album up again today. Full lyrics here.

In the stillness,

Sandy

Note: I love autumn, but it always takes me back to when my mom fell in 2011. She stayed a short time in a local nursing home to rehab and then had surgery that diagnosed her glioblastoma multiforme–an aggressive form of brain cancer. Sissy and my dad and I lived with her in Hiland Cottage, the hospice home where she spend her last days. The memories and grief seem a little more acute this year than last. I drove a Dodge Journey during that time. This is a repost.