TRUST: 31 days of 5-minute free writes

Today, I was driving home from my niece’s soccer game.

I was driving west, and the sun was shining directly into my eyes.

I’ve driven the rural, curvy road I was on many times (it’s the route from our hometown to Valdosta, Ga., where my daughter has lived since 2014).

Today, I had hit just the confluence of bright sun and my need to keep heading west.

I also didn’t have sunglasses. I hardly ever wear sunglasses anymore, and I need distance glasses to drive anyway (although I skirted that need yesterday when I had a brief episode of not being able to find my distance glasses (shhhh…..)).

I was glad, first of all, that the car’s visor works on the driver’s side. As my old car, True Blue (now renamed by its owner as “Blue Skies”) got older and more decrepit, the visor on the driver’s side wouldn’t stay up — and I didn’t always want it DOWN, so I permanently put together a contraption of mini-bungies to keep it up. It was a constant topic between my father-in-law and me — the memory makes me laugh now, because there was some product on TV that was being sold that was a replacement-type visor. He used to say, “You should get one of those!.”

There I was — bright sun, curvy road, only my hand to try to shield my eyes.

There were multiple points when I had to trust that the road underneath me was the road I have traveled so many times before — that even though the bright light was temporarily making it almost impossible to feel confident that I was on the right path, I would indeed arrive at my destination safely.

Every time I came back into a patch where I could, indeed, see the road beneath me, I would breathe a little sigh of relief.

All of that is a good reason to pay attention to the roads we travel. We may have to traverse them in the future when we don’t have perfect conditions.

The 31-day writing challenge is a series of 5-minute free writes throughout the month of October. Please forgive any spelling/grammatical errors. I’m trying to (for once) be true to the challenge’s purest form.