Linked Within

This summer we drove from San Francisco to Kentucky, the first time in five years that we didn't hop a flight.  It took four days, figuring in the stone monoliths of southern Utah that summoned us and a 'check engine'  light that detoured us in Kansas. Our latitude stayed roughly the same, but changes in attitude accompanied all the landscapes that blurred past us as we drove.

The California hills that took us toward Nevada were Edward Weston's reclining brown nudes, hips and shoulders making an earth song to the sky. Utah's Salt Lake, from our perspective, was a white desert, under a sky so hot it caused road mirages to distract us for miles.  Cars levitated in the shimmering air, not coming down to earth until we were close enough to see their license plates.

In Missouri, the hills assumed a new familiarity.  Outside St. Louis green rows of corn took over, and linked us with every field of childhood.  Whoever coined the phrase, "a sight for sore eyes," understood the healing that occurs when you finally see something, or someone, that has been absent too long.  It's a bath of epsom salts, a gentle flushing out of foreign matter.