from To Everything a Season, by Janet Sunderland

BlueCanoe, White Wild Indigo, 2011. WC CC

When did I fall in love with the road? I wonder. It seems most of my life has been lived watching a double yellow line. When I was less than a year old, my mother, my sister, and I moved from San Francisco to Kansas while my father went to sea; a year or so later we moved back to California; then to Arkansas; then to Barnes, Kansas—all before I reached five. I remember a roadside neon sign on the highway going to Grandma and Grandpa Sunderland’s—maybe in Marysville since that’s the only town between Barnes and where they lived. EAT GAS it said—the red neon EAT in vertical letters while the horizontal red neon GAS met at the middle A. And I remember a winter’s night drive from Grandma and Grandpa’s, snow billowing from every direction as it does so well in a Kansas blizzard. My father hit a patch of ice and the truck flipped over to land on four wheels in a snow bank. At least that’s what I remember. We might have just spun off the road. There had to be at least five of us in the cab since three sisters and two parents had moved from Arkansas, but I don’t remember anyone hurt. And I don’t remember a baby, so I don’t think Julia had been born yet. And Jack wasn’t born until five days after my father died. And then, a year after my father died, Mother married Dad and we moved to the farm. At seventeen, I married a soldier and went off to see the world. When I divorced, I kept on moving: Kansas, Texas, California, Louisiana, New York, Old Mexico, Washington, D.C., Hawaii, Georgia, New Mexico, and back to Kansas. I’m still traveling—following the yellow line on the three-hour stretch to visit my mother in the small-town nursing home where she now lives.

—Janet Sunderland, “To Everything a Season,” Still Point Arts Quarterly Spring 2020