The itch to wander

I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you

-- "I Dream a Highway," Gillian Welch

Now it was first light, and Ivy awoke. She took a can of black paint outside to where her old, white Caddy convertible was parked. She painted it from bumper to bumper. She stepped back, looked at what she’d done. She called it good. She broke for coffee and a few songs on the boom box, “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” and “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” and “Call Me a Dog When I’m Gone.” Leaving songs. She sat out on the porch and tried not to think too awfully hard about what she was to do. She gave herself over to instinct, to impulse.

She felt the itch to wander. She gave it a scratch through the hole in the knee of her jeans.

She went back inside the shack for a can of white paint and out she came with a dripping brush and painted highway stripes up the hood and down the trunk of the old but newly black Cadillac convertible.

She stepped back again to look. She smiled and nodded. She thought of what her mama liked to say – the one thing her mama used to say that she said, still.

“I’ll be ready, Ivy Coldwater, if I never get to go.”

-- from a work in progress