Happy Thanksgiving. I survived a 10 hour drive to Richmond, VA. with my 3 month old, my 2 and 1/2 year old and mother-in-law. I'm surprised at how smoothly the drive went. Long drives (when the children are sleeping) are refuges for the mind. At home these types of rare moments (both children sleeping at the same time) are polluted by my duties to housework and laundry and cooking. But, on the Pennsylvania turnpike, my husband driving, I can sit back and let the images of a poem gather like little duststorms in my mind.

While we were driving, I saw a little kid stuck in the way-back of a hatchback. He looked lonely and tired. That used to be my seat when I was little. My mother loves to tell a story about how I was miraculously saved as a child. We were driving to my cousin's graduation from high school in a blue hatchback and I was all nestled in the way-back, but I got lonely and crawled up through the seats to the front passenger side where my mom was sitting to sit on her lap. Just then a man rear-ended us and my little seat, the hatch, was crumpled up like an accordion. You would have been killed! My mother would always say. She kept a Polaroid of the crumpled car in an album and each time we'd look through, she tell me the story again. She'd ask what made you decide to crawl up to the front? and I'd want to tell her something miraculous. That I'd heard voices like Joan of Arc, or I'd seen a vision. But, I'd just smile and say the truth.