Flying Cloud

I've been away.
And when I returned, I tossed and turned in my own bed all night and woke up with a scratchy throat and a stuffed left nostril. Not a good time for laryngitis.
There was a sermon and a column to write and my energy went into those. Picture me collapsing over my keyboard when the last word was typed and being carried, limp and empty, back to bed.
But the first-few-days-with-a-cold fogginess have passed and now the ability to function as a writer is back.
This is a photo of my mother, behind the wheel of her blue Honda Fit, somewhere in Eastern Ontario. Nicknamed "the Flying Cloud" by my husband for the speed at which she can go to Parrsboro and back. We think of it as a day trip; Mother does it in a morning.
We do road trips together frequently, whether to the Mic Mac Mall or to Ontario.
"Do you want to go to Amherst with me?" I'll ask -- it could be anywhere, really -- and she says "Yes." Of course she does. Everywhere is a road trip not to be missed.
When she drove to Georgia in September, she called me from the Tim Horton's in Salisbury, NB, where we always stop for breakfast on the first morning, and said, "This is more fun with you."
That clinched it.
So we drove to Ontario to celebrate the 90th birthday of a family friend and Mother did all the driving, as always. She drives because she hates pumping gas. That's my job as the passenger. And since she won't let me listen to the radio, particularly the news, I get to read out loud to her from the book I'm reading.
It's like LIVE books on tape. Or something. Like that. Ish.
(Perhaps I'm not quite over my cold.)
In case she's not reading this blog, I can say how much I cherish these road trips. Not just because My Friend Jane smacks me up the side of the head and tells me not to take this time with her -- my mother -- for granted. MFJ lost her mother when she -- Jane -- was 30. But I know how lucky I am that 1) we get along so well we can spend two days in the car and still be laughing when we arrive 2) in order to spend a week in the same hotel room and still be laughing when we arrive home, after a two day drive, a week later, and 3) that we have the money to do these trips.
That's the real reason I take photos of my mother when she is driving.