My friends say hello

Coming home

I love the feeling of coming home. I like to watch sunlight flickering between trees and sign posts through the car window until your eyes are seeing it like an old movie with the shutter speed turned way down. I like it when the road curves gently down a hill so that your tummy feels left behind as it goes around a corner, and then straightens out and is all where it should be again. I love coming around a bend and seeing something unexpected, like a mountain or a waterfall or a big tree, but not something like a goat or a hole in the road or a traffic jam. I like warm sun shining on the rocks and road and making them shine like sheet metal. I like small pink flowers growing unexpectedly out of the roadside, in the crack between where the barrier begins and the edge of the road ends. I like seeing people on the roadside having a picnic and watching the traffic pass them by. I like the part of the journey when you suddenly become very familiar with the surroundings and realise your home is a very large area, and not just a small flat in the middle of it. I like when you come back after a holiday and something has changed, an advert on the side of the road for dental hygiene or a new bit of highway or a garden tidied over the weekend. I like coming home and making it your home again. I like the long shower after a long drive, especially when I clean my feet, so they don’t feel like car, and my hair so it isn’t swept backwards like Tintin’s. I like feeling belonging somewhere. I like tiny broken down houses on the side of the road with no roofs and half of a window missing so it looks like it is winking at you. I like windmills, especially the one that is in the middle of a huge lake and must be the most efficient windmill ever. I also like the windmill that doesn’t work anymore, and is standing in the middle of a bowl of dust. I like big bridges that span huge chasms over a river. I like evaluating mountains that we drive past for zombie apocalypse safe-havens, because zombies probably don’t climb so good and if we can get a helicopter or something we would be able to live like Scottish highlanders and farm goats, and have small horses. I am sure there would be springs in the rocks where we could get water. But the zombies would get us eventually. They always do.