down the highway

I saw hot air balloons, two, red and yellow, blue and orange, rising along I-5 above a skirt of mist at the foot of hills and from the curves of these hills I always know I am 40 miles away from my other home. Along the strip that cuts the interstate in to two running sides, a hawk stooped on something small and frightened. And all along, the fields played out in tree lines and wet grass.

(as you can see, I have absolutely nothing to say right now)

No music on the empty roads thanks to thievery and other nefarious acts that have ripped radios from my car, but there is an Irish song on repeat in my head. Like all Irish songs it bewails time and women, friends now dead and all those dead days no one else remembers. Oddly, I was the happiest I've been in weeks, not because I was leaving or arriving but because all was well and all manner, T.S.Eliot, of thing(s) were well.

Now imagine this at a lilt, slightly mournful because those whom the gods smile upon they also destroy:

"Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond Memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm'd and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain hath bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

"When I remember all
The friends, so link'd together,
I've seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one,
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere Slumber's chain hath bound me,
Sad Memory brings the light
Of other days around me."

Potato famine. The end.