Spitting Stones

Driving home today from the high school at 7:30 a.m., my daughter safely secured in her booster in the back seat, I found myself unfortunately stuck behind an empty car carrier truck. The interstate, while clear of the massive dumpings of snow that we have had, is still perilous in points simply because the gravel that was coated over the ice still remains. As I drove, the truck in front of me showered me with little pieces of this gravel.

"We've got to get out from behind this guy," I told my daughter as she watched with feverish eyes from the back. "He's spitting stones at us."

I like the alliteration of spitting stones. And as my mind is wont to do, I mulled it over within the context of my life. Because life has been spitting at me lately. Spitting stones though, despite its lovely poetic qualities, is not a fair portrayal of my reality. Stones have mass. They cause damage. Had the truck actually spit stones at me, my windshield would need replacing. He really spit small pebbles (and some dirt). They bounced off my car, a few may have nicked the paint, but most just impaired my visibility and made quite a racket. Life, then, seems to be spitting pebbles at me.

Pebbles are annoying. They're the unreasonable daycare director that I keep threatening to kill behind her back if she doesn't figure out how to do her job properly. The ex-husband who seems to be regressing to a maturity level lower than the high school students that I teach. They're the tooth that went bad and sunk me into debt, and then had to be fixed again, and again. The constant snow, and the sudden need for new tires on my car. Pebbles are the fact that I wake up every night at three or four and then can't go back to sleep. And that last night, just as I had slipped into an almost comatose state, my daughter woke me up to announce that she had thrown up in her bed. Pebbles are the stupid, innovative substitute request system that my district has just adopted that would not let me log in. And the help desk for that system that wasn't being manned by anyone until 6:00 this morning. Pebbles make my stomach churn, my teeth grind, and my forehead crease so much that I will always have to have bangs to hide the deep wrinkles that all this has caused.

We came to our exit, and waited behind the line of cars at the stop light on the off ramp. I lowered my shoulders and took a deep breath and looked over to the creek that runs along the interstate. A pile of rocks stretched across it at the point where it lay outside of my passenger window. Dense and heavy ice draped itself over the top of the rocks and glinted like crystal in the early morning sunshine. Evidence of our hardest winter in years. But water also caught the light as it tumbled over the rocks and in between the icy holes and furrows.

"Isn't that beautiful!" I exclaimed to my daughter, and inched the car forward a bit so that she could see it too.

Winter, relentless as it is this year, doesn't last forever. Day care workers are underpaid, and more patience exists somewhere within that thought. Teeth heal, or they get pulled. Vomit washes out of bedclothes, and eventually, a person gets so tired that they'll sleep through anything. Ex-husbands? Well, that's probably just a matter of finally coming to terms with the fact that things are what they are. Until they're not. Despite the pebbles, the ice is melting. Even if, as the meteorologists are predicting, it snows more tomorrow.

Zen and the art of interstate driving. Om.