Took Another Road
Narrow and windy, night descending, lots of obstacles before you get to where you should be.
The intended story for today was about the time I got lost on a little country road after having great fun at the Georgia Mountain Fall Festival. The best part about the festival was learning how to brew moonshine and to pick out which baby pig will win the daily pig race and earn you a good $5 on a $2 bet.
But the story was really about what happened afterwards when I set out for the airport to fly home and the Google lady started complaining about the several wrong turns I insisted on taking. These led to Pine Hill Road, which cuts through a dense forest. The situation dissolved quickly from there, as these pertinent facts from an excerpt shows: . . . .a woman driving alone through the wild mountains of Northern Georgia, whose only reference point for the area is James Dickey’s novel, Deliverance. Haven’t passed another car or house since the shuttered town a few miles back. The sun filters lower and lower through the dense forest, deepening the ditches on either side of the narrow road.
This story needed one more read-through to be ready, but then on Sunday, two things occurred: The file of a story I've been working on for the last eight years suddenly disappeared off the computer. It's not even in the cloud. All that's left is approximately 10 drafts, none of which contains the most recent promising edits. The periodic internal struggle to maintain my customary chipperness became harder over the last two weeks. No reason why. That's just how it is sometimes with my special brain.
I could stop whining, do the read-through and take an extra yoga class, but you know what? It’s the last week of August, traditionally a week when no one, no one at all, is interested in doing anything else but checking out. Given the general mood of our republic, I bet a lot of you are attempting to do just that. The last thing you’re interested in is an e-mail from America Eats! delivering an encounter about a lost woman who ends up at one of the best restaurants she’s ever been to, and somehow that leads to sleeping in a small musty cabin in the very woods she’s trying to flee from.
The thing is, you are as checked out as I want to be, and the story will be as lost as the one that disappeared on Sunday. That would, indeed, impact the struggle to once again be chipper.
We have come to a fork in the road, where the Google lady has lost all faith in me.
I’m going to lead by my gut and decide to save the story until September 12, a date that seems more promising for you to notice the America Eats! e-mail and read how this little tale comes out.
In the meantime, in fact just now with the morning cup of tea, the Heartland Food Products Group has unexpectedly offered a bold attempt to bolster the day. I’m not very fond of this kind of commercial inspirational messaging, but someone wise whose name I can’t remember once said to me, “Sugar pie, take a smile where you can find it.”
Perhaps, for the few valiant readers out there today, you will smile, too.
So, thank you, Splenda! And thank you, dear readers, for thinking to yourself, what the hell! and opening this story; I am truly grateful. Now go off and enjoy the last of this hard summer!
One last word. . . . .come October, if you need an adventure of your own and don’t have anything to do from the 6th to the 14th, take yourself to the Georgia Mountain Fall Festival. The countryside is beautiful, and moonshine lessons and pig races are a merry antidote to life’s tiny bumps.
Yogi Berra said ‘When you come to a fork in the road, you take it,’
I'm reading and sending my thoughts after the loss of that file of yours. I know how horrible that must be. But I also know that what you rewrite in its place will be even better.