the roads have no calm in their eyes or anywhere else.

I drove back from a meeting with a friend this afternoon, and he cautioned me to drive with care. I appreciate his concern, and I always do, but this was a cakewalk. I had only a couple hundred miles, I was wide awake, and I almost got a good nights sleep last night.

I do remember a night long ago, driving home- or, rather, driving to Toronto from Northern ontario- I had spent the weekend with the OgGirlfriend (wasn’t quite the ogwife yet) and had to go back to the city to finish a job.

I cupped the ogwife’s ears in the palms of my hands, my fingers in her hair, bent down, kissed her a long time.

Got in my rental car and headed south.

Ontario route six between Chatsworth and Mt Forest is a dark, remote stretch of road. The snow was coming down in golfball sized flakes. The road has- in some places- ravine sized ditches on either side, and they were filled with snow- the snow, by this time of the night, over the tops of the fences on either side.

The wind blows the roads relatively clear, rarely more than six inches on the road, but impossible to see where the road ended and where the ditch began. Several times I almost drove the rental off into the ditch. By eleven, I hadn’t seen another car, and there was enough snow and little enough light, that there was a good chance I was going to run off the road.

So I opened the trunk, and grabbed my toolbox, a bright orange Platt luggage case. I put one foot on the tarmack and another on the gravel, and walked far enough down the road that I could barely see the headlights of the car. I sat the toolbox down, and walked back to the car, drove to the toolbox, repeated.

I did six miles like that, until the sides of the road became more visible, and put the toolbox back in the trunk, drove the rest fo the way back to the job.

All that time I could only think of that kiss. When I have a hard trip to take, bad roads, horrible weather, I think of that night, that kiss. It gets me through.