Awakening

I come awake amid a pile of fluffy bedding that might be first cousin to a French dessert.  The room is under assault from full daylight.  The lamp normally at my bedside has been removed.  Gone, too, the nightstand.  Walls the wrong color.

I cautiously rub at my eyes which feel, peculiarly enough, like rough gravel underfoot.

Only then does a wave of recognition wash over me.  I have come alive in Ohio this morning.

Ohio is quite handsome in its own way.  Fifty degrees warmer than the one degree and heavy snow I experienced on the mountain pass before I descended to my cabin only two mornings ago.  Half the trees still display patchworks of leaves twirling from red to orange.  Tended green lawns from end to end.

But Ohio is also strange.  Driving from place to place after our arrival last evening, we whisked past a fast food drive-up at regular two-minute intervals.  Highways assault highways here.  Sometimes, you might look up in the air and see the Goodyear blimp.  Birds here are incurious and fly away from you instead of toward you.      

Soon we will drive amid the trees and lawns and fast food outlets and assaulting highways to see the brightest, smartest, cutest granddaughter on this side of wherever I am.

Thing is, she is talking now, and if she calls me Papa I am likely to melt and stick there for good.

-- Mitchell Hegman