Milk. A cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee? M&Ms? All the same 25-minute drive.
“Just down the road’’ is how my friend sees it. Just down the road is 20 minutes in one direction or 40 minutes in another, or an hour or more, distance and potholes irrelevant to her. She can see from her window the top of a mountain she has climbed. She can see a meadow, trees, earth, and sky. Deer graze in her yard. Moose, bears, foxes, coyotes. They have all come to call.
She hears birds all day and the wind rustling and snow falling and rain trickling.
These things sustain her.
I like them, too. But not as much as she does. I like the newspaper at my door and looking out my window and watching people walking by. I like having constant access to the Internet, not just sporadic. I like texting and downloading and knowing that if I’m out of canola oil, all I have to do is cross the street and borrow some.
I walked my friend’s dog every day, three times a day, down a beautiful country road. There was no traffic to dodge, and the air smelled like earth, and I was surrounded by mountains and sky, and there were horse farms and streams just unfrozen, gushing and surging, and no horns and no sirens, just birds cawing and the sound of my footsteps and the tinkle of the dog’s leash, and it really was “God’s in His heaven. All’s right with the world.’’
Or it should have been.
Except that I found myself thinking about people being snatched off country roads. Who would hear? Who would know? And Stephen King, how he was run down by a car on a quiet country road, and how much more comfortable I am walking my son’s dog in New York City, where there are people, people everywhere.
