This post is long and rambling. Read at your peril.

It's not important why I got in my car and took off down southbound I-65 without a clue in the world where I was going. Suffice it to say that I really needed to go for a drive. My original thought was just to head down the Interstate and find out what was between home and wherever I decided to turn around. The last time I did that, I was with my dad and we ended up in a place called Sonora. I have no idea how far I'd have driven without the intercession of another idea. I might have ended up in Nashville.

But instead, I noticed an upcoming exit sign for Mt. Washington, a town in Bullitt County. My maternal grandparents are buried in a cemetery there called Highland Memory Gardens. I got it into my head to go visit them, assuming I could find the cemetery based on fragmented childhood memories of eternal-seeming drives. So I got on eastbound Route 44 to see if it lay along that mostly two-lane road.

I'll spoil everything now and tell you that I never found the cemetery. Later I learned that it lies along a road that crosses Route 44, and if I'd turned at the one intersection where I considered doing so, I'd have found it. It didn't really matter. The drive became something a bit different.

Many of you will be surprised to learn that I wasn't playing any music at all. For some reason I didn't want a soundtrack -- too cinematic. I was more interested in The Way Things Are.

I passed my older sister's old high school, Bullitt Central, and its archrival, Bullitt East. There was a crowd at Bullitt East's stadium, though I didn't note the occasion. I think I even saw the place where she got married; if it's the same building, it's been converted into a bar. The area I drove through is rife with odd juxtapositions -- sprawling new developments with names like "Wildwood" dot the area, but there are always neighbouring houses that you can tell were there long before the other land was sold. Sometimes these houses are dilapidated; other times they are almost obsessively well-kept in a bizarre sort of attempt at competition with the huge houses across the road. Drywall companies occupy buildings that look more like churches, a conclusion more easily reached when the flagpole in the parking lot still flies the Christian flag. Signs warn of school bus stops ahead. Often people advertise yard sales, surplus firewood, or vehicles for sale on cardboard tacked to telephone poles. One such advertisement was in two parts: "Need New Friends?" appeared, then "Free Kittens" just before a driveway punctuated the long expanse of grass beside the road. A judge named Minton is running for the Kentucky Appeals Court, and of course the gubernatorial race had its own yard signs of both persuasions here and there. It is difficult to go a mile without seeing a church, be it Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, Mormon, or a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses. The road is often flanked by rows of trees on either side; the leaves are changing and often the splashes of colour are truly spectacular. I imagine it's easy to get lost in admiring the foliage and wreck on such a twisty road. Occasionally a plume of smoke would tell me that not everyone is as enamoured of the changing, falling leaves as am I. I saw a dead opossum in the road. I don't think it was faking. I saw lots of cows, and the occasional horse, and even a horse farm whose sign bore the pattern of its jockeys' silks. I saw tobacco leaves drying to yellow in an old barn whose door had been left open. I passed three businesses in a row run by the same family. For a while I was stuck behind some enormous red piece of farm machinery that dominated the lane we were sharing. Occasionally slivers of dry vegetation would blow loose from its innards and brush across my windshield. That no-passing zone was very long.

After a while, I found myself in Spencer County and decided that as soon as I found a place to turn around that wasn't a private driveway, I should do so and head back home, since I'd already had to turn on my headlights. I finally came upon Spencer County Elementary School. As I was pulling out onto westbound 44, I noticed that there was a cemetery across the street.

On my way back I saw a tiny patch of a rainbow borne on day's last light.