The Gray Drive

There’s nothing quite like driving to cause old memories to stir, even on a chilly, gray day. And, there's no drive better than the drive that takes you through beloved, familiar territory. As the well known landscapes slide by, a carefully selected music mix serves as a soundtrack, and the hum of your tires on the road serve as the final component of the spell to transport you back to another time. The flat, Bluegrass terrain becomes more rolling, and there ahead the hills of eastern Kentucky rise above the countryside. My parents are from those hills, and their parents before them. Seeing them ahead always makes me feel like I'm coming home. 

This particular drive was taking me down the Mountain Parkway to West Liberty. Administering an estate is tough work, even if the estate isn't that large. There are complex emotions wrapped up in the paperwork and account balancing, memories that I'd rather not face again. Mine and Kevin's grandparents' house was built in the 1950's, and my father inherited it from them. Now, the management of the house has come to Kevin and I. That was the reason for the gray drive. 

All was dark in the house when I arrived. The power had been turned off, and had yet to be reconnected. The only sound was the ticking off the clock, marking each second that slipped by into history. The house was disheveled, a symptom of my brother and I attempting to determine the value of the accumulated odds and ends of a person’s life. Grandmother, grandfather, and father, all had lived here before. That was another time, though. All had gone on, like sand that escapes your grasp they fell away into memory. The wall clock continued to tick off each second. Tick, tick, tick. The gray skies overhead dampened the ambient light. On the coffee table in the living room, there was a John Deere cap, the one Jr. Adkins used to wear. Tick, tick, tick... In the kitchen, the pan that Nell would bake Sunday morning biscuits in sat cold and empty, in the dark. Tick, tick, tick. Time moves on, but memories linger. These memories awakened like ghosts during the gray drive down the Mountain Parkway, these and more. 

Perhaps there are no physical ties that bind one to a particular location, but there are mental threads that connect us to places from our histories. Highways serve as a transition from one place to another, but sometimes they unlock memories that transport the driver back to another time. This gray drive bridged past and present, and mingled them with the unknowable future. How the estate administration will play out is yet to be determined, but with each action that my brother and I take, we try to honor the memory of our family in whatever way we can. That is enough.

The Mountain Parkway