The Detour

Due to some very dark thoughts, I find myself taking an 85 mile detour to the neighborhood market two miles away. It is a worthwhile trip, an attitude readjustment of gargantuan proportions.

I drive due east. Thirty five miles straight through time and country where soybeans and corn have usurped Illinois prairies. Past aging wooden utility poles now splintering and leaning towards the very homes who once waited with baited breath for the power to light those old yellow incandescent bulbs that meant modern conveniences.

Now these same houses stand empty and blind, plywood nailed over their lower windows to keep the only creatures who want in -- out.

Like the Terracotta armies of Qin Shi Huang, fields of corn stand at attention with military preciseness, surrounding the last of the tiny land barons; here to protect them as they religiously alternate corn and beans in an effort not to rape the last of the good earth left.

I drive down roads not divided into lanes. Roads lined with clumps of red clover, nightshade and white breasted swallows already swooping over fields in swarms, feasting on the bugs who rise up between the stalks. These roads meander through land that has not changed much in my sixty-six years. Black top and smooth it is unlike the grass roads that run into corn fields and rare copses where farm houses once stood.

I could have kept going on these roads, but the setting sun pulls me back towards the west and the giant wind turbines trying to provide a more environmentally sound source of energy. I am feeling  better and it is time to go home.

I come back into town from the opposite direction and make that stop at the store, buying things that didn't even exist when I was a child and wondering if it was all worth it?