Riding, Just To Ride

Today, I can understand my late husband’s need to wrap his legs around the casing of a motorcycle and ride and ride and ride: highways and byways or backroads, into whatever territory drew him. I understand it today, because I can’t think of anything better to do.

It’s a smoky day in late August and I am so restless. Behind the wheel of the car, I feel like there’s a wind up my butt and I can’t stop my foot from pushing the accelerator faster and faster. I’m not going very far. There’s an anniversary celebration for a non-profit organization at the park in Ukiah and a Quilt show in Laytonville. If there was something in Ft, Bragg, I’d probably drive there too. I think of all the things I can do at home (the list is long) but I have no interest in staying put. So, I drive, much like I did last September when the previous bite of restlessness hit me. Then I drove from Shasta Lake, a town north of Redding, through my town of Willits, to Ft Bragg. It was about a six-hour drive. Like then, I am perfectly content to sit behind the wheel and watch the trees go by. See the brown grasses of fall and notice which leaves have that little hint of yellow or orange. Just watch traffic come and go in front of me and behind me and just be …. Just be.

Why can’t I do this in my own back yard? I don’t know, but I can’t. There I get antsy. Maybe I’ve caught my late husband’s need to go, go, go. Now it’s my own.

There is something more twirling inside me, unsettled, unmet, unanswered. Something that’s on the edge of being needy and unresolved. It soothes my mind just to look at the expanse of earth that goes off to the mountains to the east.

And yet, I’m antsy even here, like I can’t go fast enough to outrun the discomfort on my skin. If I were home, I might try to rearrange the furniture or pull out every crafty project I have started then return them to different niches. I might pull out viable plants in the garden then try to replant them.

Instead I am on the verge of tears trying to describe what this unearthly feeling is all about. I want something to happen and I’m not convinced that I’m the person to make them happen. I want to write my next book, but I can’t get my butt in the chair to do it. I want to sit in the garden but haven’t found the time to sew the cushions for the seats of the newly finished metal table and chair set. I want to have more color in the garden, yet I hold back from redoing the watering system, so I can create different beds of flowers. I want change of some kind, yet I don’t know what kind and I don’t know why I can’t just figure it out in my head.

Maybe if I do each of the things that I’ve listed above, the momentum will evolve into whatever the next step is that’s supposed to come my way. Maybe, since I felt so accomplished after I’d finished the table project, I am supposed to continue doing things on my own to call to me projects that are at this point unseen but waiting for me to get my confidence up to do.

Maybe this energy that is me powering from Point A to Point B is meant to be harnessed and fed into my cauldron of creativity for some purpose I have yet to know.

Maybe completion is a step toward my own next phase of transitioning from having been married to experiencing widowhood to realizing that I am really on my own. And maybe this is all a simple matter of getting out of my own way, doing what there is to do, and allowing what comes next to evolve into being. Maybe it just does not have to be so hard.

And maybe, driving like the wind is what I needed to clear my head.