A Love Letter to Summer Drives

We put a few thousand miles on our car going nowhere. With the windows down, we’d take synchronized breaths as the earth and plants opened up for the last light of day. The smells would shift as the wind rushed past the windows—a green floral one moment, a mossy dampness the next. Burning wood. Skunky sulfur. Fresh cut grass. Here one minute and gone the next.

“It’s like hoping for something that’s disappearing,” he said as he watched the last bit of light fade down the road—a puff of red and orange under dark blue, all framed by silhouetted trees and the pavement of a two-lane country road.

This summer we chased earth smells and sunsets and fireflies and comets. We chased away our anxiety and our boredom and our fears. We listened to lawn mowers and passing cars and buzzing cicadas and the pops in his neck as he turned to take in the landscape from left to right. We listened to the radio, to improvised playlists, to entire albums from start to finish. 

We went through tree-lined forest roads that would contract like a tunnel of green above us and then open up suddenly to a vast expanse of meadow or farmland and a sky full of color. Eyes out to the horizon, I’d call out the grazing deer as we passed them, some too close for comfort. We went under overpasses, over gravel, through sudden mists. We took the same path over and over. We traveled new roads and let our instincts make the turns.

We watched a late summer firefly resurgence make the road shoulders glitter in bioluminescence. We saw clouds of bugs swarm over meadows, backlit by glowing sunlight. Our windshield became streaked with the remains of insects sacrificed to our meandering drives, reminding me of the inherent violence of being a human on this planet. 

We drove through neighborhoods and I imagined our lives there—strolling the sidewalks, joining the swim club, playing tennis. I’d need to learn how to play tennis. We drove by homes with acres of space and I imagined our lives there too—sitting on a porch swing, planting a garden, watching clouds of bugs swarm over the yard, backlit by sunlight. I’d need to learn how to garden.

We talked about what to have for dinner. We talked about definitely buying a house. We talked about maybe renting for just a little longer. We talked about PhD’s and master’s degrees. We made plans that were cancelled. We talked about fish tanks and cats and children. We talked about 5 months from now and 5 years from now. Sometimes, we’d talk about politics and social issues. We kept mental notes on which areas had more Trump signs and which areas had Black Lives Matter signs. We agreed that we should live in an area with more of the latter. 

And just like that, summer was nearly over as we lurched forward into September.