On the Road

GIFTS FROM ABOVE:
notes from the road

By Barbara Barrow

There is a low ridge of mountains that rises to the northeast horizon of Highway 87 as you travel from Denver to Austin. It was while looking at this elongated elevation, on a star-filled night recently, that I learned how to get glimmers from the stars.

We've covered a lot of ground in our time, mostly following the dreams of my husband. To him all things musical or philosophical are interesting so we have left the beaten path to travel down a long and winding highway that leads to some very interesting people and places.

This particular night found us heading down the road toward Texas. I like barbeque, kayaking and country music that has an essential country flavor. Not an artificial taste strangly remnicent of pre-packaged white cake mix but the real thing. I like a spanish guitar that reminds me of Sunday afternoons spent with friends feasting on flamenco music, pot-luck dinners and riding the horses hard at the ranch. So I am very happy my husband reviewed Twistin' in the Wind, by Joe Ely. It's all there...sounds and images expertly layered into the most intense sensations. Listen to it if you get a chance.

So here we were on another adventure, on the road in search of a story. Feeding a deep hunger that only a journey can satisfy. It is in these times of journeying that the inspiration to write always overtakes me. I wish I had the poet's spirit like Bob Dylan and Joe Ely but I am content to appreciate individuals like them.

I had just finished washing my hair and had decided to use the natural blowdryer that is available by simply opening one of the bus windows as it hearls down the open road. As I looked at the stars, working each section of hair with a brush, I noticed little sparks of static electricity that flew between the brush bristles and my hair.

A little laugh escaped my lips because it seemed so poetic that the glimmers from the stars would leap so willingly from the sky and allow themselves to be brushed into my hair. The sky seemed to applaud my thought with a gentle clap of thunder. Looking around, I noticed a ball of fire that danced beyond the hills. This lightning was partially hidden by a silken lacework of clouds that hugged and occasionally slipped off the shoulders of these gentle hillsides. The light continued to flash intermittently. Each time it shown, it was partly obscurred by the everchanging horizon line and the cloud formations.

I thought about the situation my family and I were in, living on the road. And I grasped how, if a person looked at it just right, we were...blessed. Here I was able to straighten out my curls with so much beauty around me. Most women my age would have only polished mirrors, sterile tiles and unchanging wallpaper patterns to look at while blowing out their tresses. I do not own the road and the hills and the moon. Yet, they give themselves to me generously and I drink them in, thankfully.

I was enjoying the coolness of the evening and the wind blowing through my hair and the playful spectacle of the lights that shared that little stretch of New Mexico road with me, I took in as much as I could but soon my eyelids began to falter and my head began to droop.. Fortunately, my husband decided it would be a good time to stop to rest for the evening.

I wound my body around his but kept my face pointed toward the open window and the rolling prarie beyond. I was drifting into slumber when I remembered to check on the children.

Stopping for a second to gaze at how perfectly excellent they looked, I wondered how they managed to appear so innocent when they were asleep. My daughter's angelic face was caressed by tendrils of gold and bronze and my son's features were illuminated like marble by the fire over the mountains.

The thunder continued to rumble across the hills and the smell of sage and the meadow's grass, anticipating the promise of rain, filled the bus. I thought of home and how it is right here. And I thought about life and I knew that God was right when He created the world and said that it was good.

I stumbled back to bed and gently kissed the cheek of my snoring husband. I moved silently, hoping not to wake him.

When morning arrived, I felt my little girl smoothing my hair with her silken fingers. She said, "Your hair smells so pretty and it looks like somebody spilled glitter into it." I told her there must be some glimmers from the stars left in it from the night before. Her eyes lit up in anticipation. She knows I'm always good for a story or a song whenever I say something like that first thing in the morning.

My little boy pressed his sleepy toes into the folds of the comforter and asked me if I had seen the light that was bouncing over the mountains the night before. He said, "I think some men were shining spotlights up there and I was trying to figure out how they did that." He said he had watched it flash over and over while he was listening to the radio and that it looked real neat.

My daughter said she was going to draw a picture of getting glitter from the stars and my son guffawed that "glitter from the stars" didn't sound very scientific. He and his sister have learned an appreciation for the analytical from their technologically gifted father. I can't help but marvel sometimes at their ability to tackle complicated things like creating web pages with eyes, ears and minds so actively focused. The skies heaved one last sigh and the clouds began to spend their hoarded treasures onto the earth. Little rivers of rain found their way down the dusty panes of the bus's glass.

We snuggled more deeply into the covers and watched as the thirsty fields welcomed the long-awaited gift the sky had to offer. I suggested to the children a way to appreciate glimmers from the stars as the prarie was enjoying the wealth from above at that moment. I asked them to practice seeing and hearing not only with their minds but with their hearts because the greatest gift from above lives within our hearts. That's all the news for now.

--Barbara