Like a Wagon Wheel

I was walking to pick up my car from the shop. I had my headphones in and flicked my thumb up the small screen of my iPod. What to listen to...I paused on Old Crow Medicine Show. Why not?

Of course, I was naturally inclined to scroll  downdowndown to Wagon Wheel. Play.

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I am sitting in the Beehive, listening to Dylan August play at a fundraiser coffeehouse. Dr. Amy sits next to me and makes a small joke about the song. I nod my head, and Jonnell hums in smiles.


I am driving from Pennsylvania. I lightly hum along with the car stereo. It is near midnight on Christmas day, and the dark hills of Kentucky swallow me in their climbing curves. Katlin is sleeping in the backseat as my mother sits next to me, trying to keep her eyes open.


I am walking around the house. Sam is walking around the house. We are getting ready to go hiking. As we pass each other, our bare feet on cold tiles, we don't even look at one another; I hear him murmuring the words as I let the melody hold in my throat.


I am sitting in a bright, familiar dining room. Martin plays guitar. I thwack terribly on a pair of spoons. Elias pops a shaker in the air. We don't all agree, but we are smiling. Kim and Julia join harmonies. We can feel the summer clouds pumping humidity into the windows.


I am sitting around a campfire in Northern California, singing with my sister and now brother-in-law. We try our best to harmonize, but the notes seem as far away as the stars that peek through the trees: smoke, fire, song.

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Funny how 3 minutes and 51 seconds can go so far away. I can feel the road's curves, the solid tile, the coming rain, the scent of campfire. Where are we all now?

East to Southwest. East to Northwest. North to South.
People out here measure location quite specifically with the cardinal directions. The streets are lined with signs reading, "No Parking West of Here" as if it were so clear which way that was. My friends here say they can always tell where they are because of the Sound. The Sound is always West.

Arizona, Pennsylvania, California, Washington.
Sometimes I wonder what is in-between. I've driving along the main roads there and back and back again. I've flown over the wrinkled hills and cookie-cutter fields. I know the in-between is there.

Sometimes that in-between has a way of disappearing. I have been grounded in Washington for a bit now, and some days, it's hard to remember that there is a small town called Waynesburg or that there is a big blue house tucked in the woods on the top of a hill in Westmoreland County. It's hard to realize that on that hill, the vine-coated and rusting "Handicap Pedestrian" signs no longer apply. It's hard to let it sink in that in the cleft of the road's bend, a young man in a wheelchair no longer lives. And a tall, skinny girl with short, straight hair, wandering eyes, and itchy feet has grown and fled to a foreign life.

On top of my new hill, Queen Anne, I see mountain and water. The peaks and crevasses never seem the same, yet they are somehow, day and day again. I spend my time going up and down the hill. The wave of my life, undulating in tides of hills: Mamont, Waynesburg, Seattle. Each is bigger than the last, and I wonder when the soft white cap will form a breaker. Which soggy patch of sand will swallow me in high tide?

And those 3 minutes and 51 seconds have taken me farther and closer and re-circling through the patterns of here and there.

I was walking to pick up my car from the shop, and suddenly, the whole world didn't seem so far away.