looking

Today I drove past the road-reflector-sticking crew: a truck with flashing lights pulling a very ordinary trailer on the corner of which crouched two men, one with a tar gun and one with reflectors.  The truck drove very slowly, stopping every so often for the tar-gun man to squirt a spot of tar and the reflector man to put a reflector on it.   Imagine doing that for miles and miles of road!  Ah, but tonight there were the reflectors, like a string of stars winding with the road, and if any of the reflector crew happened to see it, I’m sure they were glad.

After the reflector crew was left behind this morning, I drove past an old man in a blue plaid shirt and straw hat, who seemed to be hunting treasure in the highway median.   As I came along he bent and picked up some small something and put it in his pocket, and then straightened himself and walked placidly on, just as if he were in a field on his own farm instead of in a median.  Under his hat, the sun reflected off his glasses.

The medians and ditches are striped with the brown remains of last week’s mowing.  On a kudzu-covered hill, I saw a little mowed green path climbing up and disappearing into the trees, and I wanted to follow it.  Where trees overhang the narrower roads, leaves come spinning down and down with the smallest wind.  They lie on the road, enticing feet to come and crunch them.

Everything is picturesque in the fall.  Faded things fit with the tone of the landscape; even a declining strip mall matched the mood today and seemed neither ugly nor dismal.   Yellow cautionary signs and the center lines on the roads no longer stick out as man’s impositions on the scenery, but instead seem to have grown out of nature’s color palette.   It is a world wherein tips of tree-branches are tinged with rust and the moon is a large yellow gibbous in the blackness above blacker trees.  I am glad.