To Make a Rough Day Better

When it's been a rough day, and important things have been said and re-said so many times that your ears are numb, and your husband is fine with putting the kids to bed himself, get in the car and drive.

Go anywhere and nowhere, up, around, and back again, and drive to a park a ways out that's quickly emptying with the falling dusk. Banish any thoughts of the dangers of solitude, though send a quick text message so they'll know where to find your body, should it come to that. Choose a path to leave.

Walk slowly through the grass and clover. Approach an old tobacco barn-- sadly, a plaque declares, the last one standing in the county-- and rest your face on its side, catching a whiff of sun-baked age. Notice a pasture with something grazing, which turns out to be a horse, which turns out to be interested in your amateur clicking and whose affable approach (rapid and instant enough that you fancy yourself a horse whisperer) stops immediately once it's obvious you don't have any treats. Apologize and move on.

Take the hill around the back of the restored farmhouse. Breathe in the cooling air, the darkening air, the buggy air that makes you reluctant to stop for too long if not for some sort of earth-bound imperative that you MUST STOP and just listen. Take your place by a pen of sheep, and stand.

Watch the trees. See the moon. Watch the ants on the fence. Just miss a firefly with every peripheral blink...blink......blink.

The sheep have noticed you standing there and begin to wonder what's up. At first they're all watching, and then the lambs lose interest (much like your own children do) and only the grownups remain. The male triangulates himself slightly to the front. An automatic light goes on at the rear of the barn.

But still you stand there, and listen to the frogs, and God stands there, and listens to the frogs, and you feel a kind of duel gravity: the kind that keeps you upright, and the esoteric sort used to describe something momentous, but you're too unwound to parse that out now. He is with you, and that's enough.

At last, when the bugs begin to take you for some sort of prime-time snack, take your leave of the sheep and follow the fence back to the beaten path. Watch the taillights of the park ranger's car receding through the bars of a now-locked cattle gate, and adjust your route back to the parking lot accordingly.

Climb in, buckle up, turn on the headlights and The Jayhawks.

Drive home.