Driving along the highway through the bluffs, then up through the hills and onto the high prairie, I watched the shadow of my car along the shoulder, highlighted by the setting sun.  I sped north as the clouds turned pink and then the sun dipped lower and lower.  On my left, it sank below the horizon.  On my right, the sky turned red as it reflected the sunset on the clouds.  In front of me was the horizon and over that to the north, the town where my father lay in the hospital.

Going north, I watched the familiar landmarks go by.  The turnoff to the country church.  The windmill.  Then, the giant water tank that marked the edge of the prairie, the “table” as we called it, because as it went north, it dropped off into a valley full of Ponderosa pines.  The road curved and I descended into the dimness of surrounding trees, the car filling with the scent of pine and night falling as suddenly as a curtain.

Every time I pass this point, I weep.   Last Friday was no exception.  Driving from the city and going west, hour by hour I shed the years from myself and went backward to a time when I was someone’s daughter instead of someone’s mother, someone’s sister instead of someone’s wife.  The further northwest I drove, the more my present life receded and the more my origins stepped forward to pull me back into that valley of trees, those stretches of prairie, those places of solitude.

I passed through the pines and watched on my right as more familiar landmarks rushed to greet me.  The high bluff with a cross on it, the bridge over the dry creek, the twin city reservoirs to my right surrounded by dead fall rushes.  In the dusk, yellow lights from houses shone along the hillsides, and as I crested the hill, my hometown was a thin scattering of lights.

I slipped back into my origins last week, and for the first time, it felt welcoming and right instead of constricting and awkward.  For four days, I was a daughter and a sister.  For four days, I had the opportunity to do both things right.  Instead of focusing on the past, I was present.  I was there.  I was with the people who made me. 

For the first time, I sat down with my father and held his hands.  I looked in his eyes and saw the blue I had never noticed, the age I had never acknowledged.  His enormous hands were calloused and thick.  He looked back at me, and I didn’t see fear of the future, or judgment or disappointment or sorrow.  I saw love. 

It was an adjustment, a long overdue one.  I finally shook off the past and my ideas of how things should have been.  In that time and place of things stripped to their most elemental, I was not an adult and I was not a child.  I was a daughter and he was my father and life became nothing more than the desire to stretch out time long enough to spend it together in this new place that was not yesterday and not tomorrow but right now.

When it was time to go, I sat with him briefly and told him a funny story.  He smiled and nodded and squeezed my hands. 

Driving home, I traveled back through the trees and up through the grey light filtering through the pines.  It was morning and cloudy, and as I came back up out of that valley, the sky was so huge on the table.  All around me was the familiar landscape of that place I came from, a hardscrabble town carved out of the bluffs and windy prairie. 

I drove up out of it and my origins stayed with me as my real life settled back on me.  I finally reconciled being both a mother and a daughter, fitting the two things together like pieces of a puzzle I just had to turn a little to find the right fit.  Driving east to my home, I felt myself leaving one embrace for another, finally knowing that the distance between them was a matter not of miles or years, but the beat of a heart.