Convoluted drive

A drumlin near Guelph, 11:30 a.m.

Sunday word association:

1. Courage:: Lion
   
2. Stamina:: Strength
   
3. Leader:: Coalition
   
4. Idea:: Brilliant
   
5. Rockstar:: McCartney
   
6. Dew:: Drop
   
7. Guards:: Witch
   
8. Lenny:: Pattison
   
9. Alliance:: Canadian
   
10. Cigarettes:: Smoke
    

So we would drive all the way to Harrow one day a week, the cigarette between her fingers. I can't remember her name now. It was a summer in the mid 1980s when I worked at the university. Once a week we had to travel to my home town, three hours the way she drove. She would smoke and I had to inhale it along with foul language and endless complaints about the System. Some of it sunk in, though. I wasn't raised to be cynical, but to think the best of everything. To believe that Government knew best and we had better fall in line.

What a revelation it was to hear anyone question anything. But it wasn't as good a summer as 1983, when Stasia Stempski was my work partner. We drove from one tobacco farm to the next all across Essex and Kent Counties. None of us on that team smoked, we all though it was an outrageous thing, and here we were researching tobacco root rot. Stasia had grown up in Africa—her parents were Canadian—and then her father died in Nairobi. She and her mom had to come back. And it was profitable for me, I learned so much about the world through the eyes of someone who had been there.

Tobacco fields smell delicious in the sun. Dried tobacco is only reminiscent of something far sweeter. I'll never smoke it, but I hope one day to stand again between the long rows of plants, tall with broad green leaves, and drink it in.

Today I drove a convoluted path, like ways through the mind. Coming home from Toronto I got sidetracked, took the first right off Guelph Line and doubled back, the sideroad following the verge of 401. I hit Appleby Line and dove up the escarpment. Wanted to get photos of the limestone ridge I talk about so much. There at the edge of a field was a black bull; glanced at me nonchalantly then lumbered to his feet, chewing slowly. Calves stood gazing from further off, their lazy eyes pink-lidded. I saw his horns, decided not to go closer.

But the sky kept driving white blasts like eye holes from the sun playing hide-and-seek. I pressed the Sunfire up the ridge, then pulled over. Something sacred on the radio, what was it now? Oh yes, Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt. Piano triads played softly endlessly against the violin. I left the key in the ignition and rolled down the window so I could hear that plaintive, reflective music. Then more sad songs: the title music from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto. The whole trip, CBC kept driving me into my heart, listening to quiet pools with water dripping. Caves deep under Devonian dolostone, somewhere stalactites stab at the core of desire. I must walk along the edge of a field to get my bearings, find my footing in solitude again.

Today my ears are bursting. It's some allergic reaction. Autumn always pounds through my head this way, vague pains and a muffling of sound. I took a Reactin when I got home, but it couldn't take away the sense of something building.

The sun thrust continual, silent kisses across the landscape. Clouds beat down endless summer. I didn't find much colour; the warmth keeps pushing it away, my heart not wanting the days to close any earlier like a book. This chapter we have finished reading. No, I pull at the cover, the leaves, but green tears away like memories left to dry long ago.

Another summer we went to Simcoe with Dr. Reader. And there we found sassafras. I had never seen it before, leaves translucent in the light, smelling of orange-cinnamon. I would place them in my field guide. They did not become brittle with age, like other leaves. Here they are, still fluttering in my room on the ghost of a summer wind.