an Old Trick
a few summer memories in one little handful.
When I first learned to drive the big red truck, I felt there was no way the road was big enough for me and everyone else to fit. Surely someone was going to lose their mirrors. But I got used to it, and the road got used to me. Where else would I want to spend all my time?
I drove an hour to pick up strawberries. The farmer, with his huge hands and wide-brimmed hat, leaned against his hay wagon in the shade of a great oak tree. The wagon was covered in flats of berries. The farmer smiled, at ease, suspended in place in the heat of the day. I haven’t forgotten that family and their house full of blond children. The farmer’s wife studied quantum physics at Columbia, and now she drives a 12-passenger van with a Catholic Radio bumper sticker.
My sister knows a family who pull into their driveway and get out of their car, leaving all the doors open when they walk away. This would drive me insane. Bewildered, I questioned her — don’t the lights stay on and drain the battery? Doesn’t bird scat fall on the seats? She shrugged. She didn’t have that information, just that this was their habit. “They’re so chill,” she explained to me, as though it were a virtue.
Our habit, in those strawberry days, was to pull in the driveway, shut off the engine, and lean back against the bench seat for a quick nap. Nothing fancy — just close your eyes for a few seconds, listen to the neighbor’s lawnmower, wait till you feel a breeze, and then open your eyes again. Rest taken. Next?
At some point we learned this was not our own original trick. Apparently members of our grandma’s family used to take brief naps in the driver’s seat before going inside. “It’s an old Hazzard trick.” A trick? More like a magic spell. Somehow, we caught on without anybody having to tell us. And so I learned to breathe, not short and gaspy, but longer and deeper.
I used to wonder how the strawberry man was so peaceful, when he had so much on his mind, so many children, and so many workers in his fields. I wondered what kind of serene haze rested over their white farmhouse with the long kitchen table and hardwood floors covered in footprints. Maybe he had happened upon a few old tricks, too.
