Driving With The Windows Down

Our poor little "Atomic Blue" has lost its air conditioning power. We've had it recharged but it didn't take long before it lost its gusto all over again. So it is probably a compressor problem which means it will cost more money than what is, ahem, "laudable" to pour into the car right now. Being poor once again affords us the opportunity to live life old fashioned, humble, quaint, and real.

We have been driving with the windows down, you know, the old style of car air conditioning. Although it has been muggy it hasn't been too bad. I almost even kinda like it. And the kids love it! Driving with the windows up, air conditioning blowing in a neatly glassed-in compartment (I hadn't realized until now) detaches you a certain distance from, well I don't want to say 'reality' but maybe the nitty-grittiness of reality. Traveling, the road, traffic - all of it becomes tangible when there is no barrier. Truck engines growl and scream past your window, the rush of air deafens the road noise with its own buffeting cacophony filling your ears and whispering through your hair of a tale, a journey to reach a destination.

The smell of place even reaches into the car.

Smell.

The kind of smell we had before there was Fe-breeze and Glade to neutralize us from smelling.

Driving past fields you can smell the type of fertilizer the farmer used, acrid burning chemicals or something more earthy and natural. You can smell the crops beginning to flower, smell the crop's clean exhaled green, wet breath. You can smell the flowers on the berm of the roadside, honeyed nectar warming in the sun, its scent so strong and sleepy that you wonder how Odysseus' men ever escaped the Lotus-Eaters and how nice it would be to forget your own travels for a moment... Yet the whir of the car wheels doesn't stop and soon you're whisked away, awakened by a chloroform of grease and oil and sweltering car exhaust.

Well, not everyone can live in my head but sometimes its a nice place to be. I can pull my rose-colored shades down low and be content despite the other part of me that wants to panic about needing more, more...

Of course, we haven't hit 90 degree temperatures and maybe my optimism will melt in the heat but even then I hope to be thankful for some aspect I haven't even begun to realize yet. Thankfulness, perhaps, is the real key that opens doors, and begins journeys.