The First Notes

Oh, I had it all planned out, scrawled in letters skipping over the cracks in the road. If the passenger seat is empty, there’s always a cheap notebook there, lurking under a few hats and the empty coffee cups. A few hundred miles puts ideas on the pages.

“Blog: Orpheus.”

It’s a solid idea. But the problem with night driving and thinking and another cup of gas station java is that the road seems to weave a spell. It’ll have me believe any thought “important”.

“I’ll write you a good blog, grandma” I told her north of Culpeper, hurtling south through the night.

There’s nothing like the glad crunch of gravel to say welcome home, so I sat a minute in the car, checking my phone while the engine cooled.

Oh, the Internet.

Some comedian screamed at a heckler, and then everyone debated mental fitness, the electric slime coating my brain.

So I got out, and crunched across the gravel with tired shoes and tired feet, trudging towards the mailbox.

Then I heard them. A whistling sound in the quiet country night. Could it be?

There was a package in the mail. I looked up at the sky: the Big Dipper wheeled high overhead. Corvus the crow winged up over Long Mountain, perched on the tail of Hydra, legends glittering in ancient starlight.

I crunched back to the house, out back, watching the pond.

The night sat still, hushed, expectant, that quiet between the symphony audience falling silent and the conductor starting. He pauses for an instant. Nobody breathes.

The radio tower blinked red, off, red, off.

I turned, heading inside, hand on the doorknob.

Peeeeeep.

Another frog answered.

Peeeep.

A dozen calls in the night.

And so it begins. It’s the most important piece of music of the year. The spring chorus.

I shook off the choking dust of the road and the snare of my own thoughts, looked back up at the stars, and went inside, glad. Tearing the paper, opened the package still in my hand: a gift, a pocket Bible from my father, something to carry on the road.

Amen.