REALITY: Memory Two Lane Highway

From the north hills country to the shore, spots along the way I’ve been before.  Route 8 south, first exit down the Rod & Gun Club, next where Louis lived–he’s now married and in Virginia.  Next one down my father-in-law, the small stone church where Jim and I were married and down the next where at the reception we danced just once together.  His brother lives off of the next exit, a couple more my former eye doctor.  Pat from Tennessee had fathers off the next three exits, Oxford, Beacon Falls and Seymour.  The hospital in Derby where I was born and where my mother last was taken when she fell.  Then the cemetary where three generations of my family lay, the next, my childhood home, my dad’s.  And the the schools and church and a decade of my life.  Another five years spent driving off the next exit across the river to an office upstairs from the factory where my father worked as foreman, now it’s flatlands that the fire left behind from the explosion.  The next exit was a regular routine with my mother and the doctors, a few years later up the hill to the home where I sat with her when she died.  Two exits up my oldest sister lived for years, the one who pulled up roots and moved to Sarasota.  Two exits more my other sister, soon she will be moving several exits back.  We pick up the Merritt Parkway then I-95.  Past the largest mall where I shopped several times a week, now very much the smallest.  Then I smell the salt air of the ocean.  We pull into the parking lot of Jimmy’s for whole-belly clams.  I cruised the lot of Jimmy’s as a teen, but Jimmy’s wasn’t here–it has been moved.  And Savin Rock the rides and games are gone–but Savin Rock itself is there, though I had never noticed it in all the years I walked the beach.  He goes off to see the classic cars on cruise night–a different kind of cruise night then I remember; Pat at the wheel with two guys trying to pick us up while I slurped two dozen raw clams off their home plates before I joined the conversation.  I take off my shoes and feel the sand and shattered shells grab at my toes.  Stare down the gulls who’ve come to see the people as their feeders.  Low tide never bothered me before, but worse than seaweed washes, wets the sand.  And though I feel a stong tie to the ocean, I cannot, maybe being from the north now, make myself go in.