and our days are slow and dear

After a fairly impromptu departure, we drove to Corpus Christi this evening, leaving Austin after dark. It was so profoundly dark on IH-37, fifty miles from nowhere, that I couldn't see what was coming around the next bend, but I could see a million stars in the sky.

Let's go fishing in the morning
just like we've always gone.
You can come inside and wake me up;
we'll pack and leave by dawn,
we will pack and leave by dawn.

--Dar Williams, 'Fishing in the Morning'

We listened to this song, over and over and over and over; it's hard to explain what the appeal is, but this is what we do some days. Over and over. The last 65 miles to Corpus, we had it on a loop in the CD player, and after a while, we started doing a different version each time. There was the Shania Twain version, the opera version, the six-year-old version, the choir director version...

Before we knew it, we were laughing until we were in tears, and we were driving down the freeway in Corpus Christi. We're just lucky that I didn't drive us into a wall or a ravine while I was laughing.

The poor cats sat in the back seat silently, afraid that we'd lost our minds.

Home again -- and off to the backwoods of south Texas tomorrow.