Wyoming - Massachusetts: A Rest Stop

I sit down at a picknick style table under a picturesque cluster of trees. It's made of wood and has been painted brown, dusted here and there with a light green moss. Birds flutter around me, and the grass is riddled with tiny white flowers. Semi trucks rumble in the parking lot.

The picknick style table is comfortably shaded and the area is kept cool by the lush grass. I couldn't pick a better place to sit and try to write of the horrors that were Nebraska and Ohio.

But I'm having difficulty. I'm here in New York State, only around four hours from my eventual destination, and I'm unable to focus on the bad parts of this trip. The irritations that I seemed to find so inspiring as they were occuring seem so small now. I try to remember the prose I imagined to describe the endless road construction in Ohio (...countless orange and white construction cones stretch off to my left as...) or the restaurant-less desolation of Nebraska (...constant hurricane winds whip across I-80, making my arms ache with the effort of keeping the car on the road...) but nothing is coming. I wish I'd have had the chance to write some of this before hand.

I look over at the car. It's parked there in the lot, bathed in golden sunlight, my wife's head visibile in the back seat. She's removing her "travel face" and putting on her "meeting the inlaws" face. She emerges, clutching her change of clothes to her breast, and heads off to the bathroom.

She looks over at me; she's beautiful. There's no one else I would have rather been stuck in a car with for four days. I wave; she waves back.

A gentle breeze rustles the trees above me.

I see a spider crawl across the picknick table towards my laptop. He's small, he's got long forelegs and short hindlegs. He's cute. He looks like he's in a hurry.

I return to notepad.exe with a blank ohio_ideas.txt open. Words simply aren't coming.

I jump as I see another spider, this one more than double the size of the last one. It's striped or checkered black and white and larger than a quarter, maybe the size of one of those old Kennedy fifty-cent pieces. He's roaming around the table, looking for trouble.

"Fucking table is infested!" I say as I stand from the bench. Maybe I should find somewhere else to sit.

Comments

[Jim Wright]

Few things are more frustrating than having genius prose come into your mind in those moments you can't record it. When the opportunity finally arrives to get it down on paper, the memory is ragged and wispy, like the flimsy remnants of a barely remembered dream. Frustration reigns supreme!

[Eugene Tower]

Eloquently said, sir. Thanks for classing the place up a little!