Car Wreck, Dec. 26, 2012

I know this looks scary as all get out.  I think I will forever be reminded of this day and know that it was just chance that in all that spinning on the icy highway that both impacts with the big truck and the semi never smashed on the driver’s side… All I can assume is that if it had, I’d at the very least have a mangled left leg.  Instead, I walked away with bruises.  Bruises… I can live with that.  And I do.  I still get a little shaken up thinking about someone being a nutjob speeding through an intersection when I’m unlucky enough to be crossing through… But it hasn’t happened yet.

I miss Emmylou.  I love that blue car.  But red Lucinda will work.  Not only is that name a reference to my poetry collection, but it just dawned on me the storyline almost echoes the succession of cars.  In the poems, mother Claire dies at the hands of a violent resentful husband who then also abandons his daughter Lucinda.  Lucinda grows up to marry another farmer man who attempts the same failed ideas of her father, more resentment and anger taken out on her.  But instead of falling to the same fate as her mother, she packs up and leaves him.  Lucinda not only survives, but she is stronger.
Oh, see that CD on the dash on the left? It was Iron and Wine’s “Kiss Each Other Clean.” It wasn’t as scratched up as it would seem to be.  It was in the visor over my head. Ray LaMontagne’s “Till The Sun Turns Black” was playing in the CD player at the time of wreck. I managed to recover all my CDs after the wreck.  Including the John Fullbright disc that was still in the visor pocket. Oh music, music, music…

I still wonder about the statue I saw in the cemetery that was alongside the highway where the wreck happened.  As I was trying to think of who and how to call someone I noticed it across the snow-covered field. I stared at it for a few seconds, grew calm, and everything after that seemed to just fall into place.  I cannot seem to find any pictures of the cemetery that shows that far left side clear enough… to see if that was really a statue or if I imagined something else.