nowhere is somewhere

Road to Somewhere

collage

7 inches wide x 7 inches high

My great-grandmother lived with us when I was growing up. She was an independent woman in her own way. She would go for walks and pick flowers from whatever gardens she passed. She would come home with great bouquets of roses and daisies and lilies and whatever else had caught her fancy that day, not paying a mind to having trespassed and stolen. She had some sad moments, too: she would forget where she put her cane and I would have to go looking for it. It was often hanging on a doorknob, but not always the same one.

And she had a lust for travel; she would sigh when she heard a train whistle. My mother told me that it had always been this way. My great-grandmother would have loved to get on any train going anywhere. My mother had inherited that (we don't know about her mother; she died before my mother got to know her well). And I have it, too. Instead of the train—although it can do it to me, too—it's the highway and the car that let me loose to go, just go. Have I written about this already? Of course, it is a constant thread. There is no nowhere.