Le Sequoit

What is So Rare?

How do you portray the beauty of such a day to those who know your land only as a simple and endless checkerboard of fields and section roads, occasionally glimpsed from a 40,000' high jetliner window? 74°, dry, scattered clouds adrift on a 10 mph northwest breeze, knee-high corn the color of Kentucky bluegrass and it just doesn't get any more pleasant. Nearly adrift on this sea of fertility, and massaged by this immense but impossibly gentle sky, I wafted my way home this evening.

I was reminded of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to the point that I might accept that if a truck veered into my lane, well, that was that, my own rapturous ascension(!?) into the unknown having a wonderfully buoyant onset.

I came up behind an impeccable pale butterscotch colored BWM convertible, the middle aged and lovely driver of which adorned with a perfectly Wurther's candy toned baseball cap. The West Palm Beach plate frame was so in keeping with the playfulness of this combination that I remembered vividly the fun of Miami. Those were some days.

I pulled up to traffic alongside a high school baseball field and standing by a fence, not more than 50' away, was the first true love of my life. Lovely as ever she was, and I flashed through all those days of grammar and high school (this love struck in kindergarten). As I took a 20 second candid take of her, I wondered if she was as happy as I was to be alive on such a day. It certainly seemed so, and I suspected that I had chosen well. I didn't honk or wave, just moved on.

I came across a classic car show spread across the lawn of a drive-in restaurant. I thought of my old Toyota Supra, and how on another day like today I might have veered off onto the hodgepodge of Wisconsin's alphabet soup of county trunk A's and B's, to ZZ's, dropping down to third to negotiate the "30 mph ahead" curves at 65. That was fun enough, but today I was perfectly happy with taking my Ford Focus straight down the road I was on.

Farther down the road I crossed a channel from one lake to another, strewn with fifteen or twenty speedboats. I remembered being at the helm under that very bridge while massaging my newly met lover-to-be's feet. To starboard I could see boats gathered at the same sandbar some twenty or so of us would venture to well after happy hour on such endlessly still, heat lightning nights. Still I moved on.

I came to my own modest little house on the prairie, where my little Hun had laid out some eggs and red peppers, and I cooked us up a scramble, adding a little sage, pepper, and garlic salt. She had watermelon and I had peaches.

I took a brandy and she had a CC and ginger ale.

It was the perfect end to a perfect day.

posted by sequoit @ 9:52 PM