As I made cookies today I noticed my brain was taking a little trip. a vacation from connecticut. We were driving down buckman road, past the cow stalls. There was the sky with puffy clouds sliding over the hills. There were the cows, staring at me. There it was, laid out before me.

I'd been there before. The dust taste in my mouth, the green water in the cow trough, the metal gates gently clanking against each other. driving free with no limit on time or destination or location. me, free.

When I was twelve my father had a near-miss accident in his studio. At the time it was just me and my dad living in our house out in the middle of nowhere. "out in the boondocks" I used to say when people asked just where. "Out past the end of west alameda." Now there is an interstate that cuts the roads in half and I can just tell people it's past the bypass. that doesn't seem quite as remote, doesn't do it justice. Anyway, my dad was working in his studio and almost dropped a grinder on his foot. That would have been a sure-fire major life or death accident and we lived too far away for anyone to bring their ambulance. They wouldn't know where to drive the ambulance- we had no street signs and I didn't know the names of the roads anyway. Our next door neighbor was practically blind and there wasn't anyone else near by.

That near miss really scared my dad and he decided that I needed to learn to drive. My brother, who was sixteen at the time, still hadn't learned how to drive so I was supposed to keep it a secret. My mother was living with a strange man on another continent, so it really was just us. So he taught me to drive.

At first he would put the keys in the ignition and have me start the car in the driveway. Then he would get out and I would practice starting the car over and over.

Then he would teach me to drive in first gear. I had been riding a motorcycle for a few years already, so I had a rudimentary understanding of gears. After first, he taught me to change gears. Then we would go driving.

When he was fairly confident that I was a safe driver, he would just give me the keys and I would go driving. The car was one of those great boxy old toyota tercels, four wheel drive. I would drive and drive and drive, with the radio up as loud as possible and the window wide open. If I got stuck in an arroyo, I would just pop that baby into four wheel drive and out I would go.

I spent an entire summer driving around the backroads of northwestern santa fe county. I would go to the river, to Diablo canyon. I would drive wherever I wanted, get out and walk around, and then get back in the car and go home. It's sort of silly that I was taught to drive in case my father had a major accident, because once I learned to drive I was never home.

Today I was making cookies and driving those roads in my mind. Thinking, measuring, reverie.

We were talking about middle school fashions the other day. I don't remember what I wore in middle school. That didn't really matter to me as much as the freedom from all that trivial stuff did. I prefer to remember the freedom of my favorite places than the blinding embarrassment of trying to fit in. I prefer to think of those years as open roads, wind, sky and me.