The Journey That Lies Ahead

By Tom Poland

 

And Other Reflections

Like sun-burnished rails, life stretches toward that hazy horizon known as the future. Consider train travel a metaphor for life, for we stand in the depot December 2015 punching our ticket. Destination?

2016 and beyond.

All aboard.

We have high hopes that the track will be smooth, straight, and free of trouble, but the path is never as straight as it seems, and the unforeseen derails us when we least expect it. There will be delays. Anticipate losses, for certain. Some of our fellow passengers will never finish the journey. For others, 2015, especially, was the year of death, that one-way journey to eternity. Thus, they consider 2015 a ghostly caboose to be uncoupled and left behind.

Take heart. Strangers will board this train we call life and some will become dear to us. Fellow travelers will hang onto jobs and relationships whose expiration date has come and gone. Others will move ahead. Here’s hoping life fares well for you in the year to come.

And what might be your final destination? Well, you just can’t know when or where the last stop will come, so make the most of your journey. Let 2016 bring you wise decisions, peace, and contentment.

 

 

 

High Hopes

Racers dream of the pole position, but not like this. This 1953 Chevy rusts on high, a memorial to advertising dreams that peddled tune-ups, brake pads, oil changes, and timing jobs. Now it rests in a sepulcher of air.

Nothing new. The Sioux buried braves on scaffolds, sacred scaffolds. Dreamers erected cars on poles, steel poles. Whether on poles or rooftops, 1950 cars turned uplifted eyes toward gas stations, diners, liquor stores, and repair shops.

A gutted exoskeleton of steel open to the elements, this Chevy collected rain and bird-borne and windborne seeds took root. Behold the grave of the unknown car, a rusting dish garden in the Carolina sky. Surely at some point its value as a classic car outraced its value as an ad.

After many, many miles, these tires worry ’bout nails no more for they long ago reached the end of the road. And that would be at the junction of Highways 15 and 301 near Santee where the great tribe of Car Shop Admen erected it.

A rusty grave in the sky for someone’s one-time pride and joy? That wasn’t part of the dream. People need dreams but dreams don’t need people.

Oh sad, sad Chevrolet, RIP.

 

 

 

 

Broomstraw Beauty

“I love broomsedge. It decorates a field in winter like no other grass,” sayeth Robert C. Clark.

“A new broom sweeps clean,” said Mom. Translation? A new boss fires people with reckless abandon.

My grandmother never fired anyone though she never hurt for new brooms. Made her own from broomstraw, she called it, using a hard-to-find commodity nowadays, innertube. (Curse you, tubeless tires.) Black on orange, she’d wrap innertube around sheathes of straw. Voila! Gaunt, wispy-headed blondes Twiggy would envy morphed into industrial-strength whiskbrooms.

One winter afternoon cold light turned everything blue and the wind ghosted across a broomstraw field at Granddad’s farm. Billowing, bowing even, the sedge seemed alive, as a deer leaping green corn is alive. Come morning amber waves of grain came to mind.

I have always tried to find beauty in this world. Some consider broomsedge invasive. A weed. I say it’s magnificent. I loved those brooms Grandmother swept oak floors with and miss them still. Leaning against the corner like a sleepy drunk, then startled awake by her steady hand, a flick of her wrist sent those flaxen-haired beauties into action banishing dust bunnies and making memories for a wide-eyed boy hopelessly in love with beauty itself.

 

 

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of eleven books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press has released his and Robert Clark’s book, Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II. The History Press of Charleston just released his book, Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

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