a certain kind of aloneness

Yesterday morning was clear and chilly, the first time since March that it felt like summer might be really and truly over. On Friday night, a cold front had swept through, and the sky on Saturday was bright blue, the kind I used to see in Minnesota, in Wisconsin. It had been two long weeks of grading six classes' worth of essays and narratives, and hosting visiting writers, and wrangling InDesign, and on Thursday I dropped my trusty old iPhone hours after ordering my new one, and its screen, already lined with dozens of microscopic cracks, shattered. First world problems, to be sure, but they are the ones I know.

It was a good day to get out of town.

I aimed the car north and drove to Augusta. It's a pretty drive, so light on traffic that I can zone out for minutes at a time. The road dips and crests small hills, through some of which homeowners have carved driveways, and the red clay that shows is shocking against the browning grass and sky. It's strange for me to remember sometimes that I live south of Augusta, that now I live just 100 miles from Aiken, the town in South Carolina where we lived for a few years in the 1980s. It was in Aiken that I split open my face on the concrete steps of the Baptist church, where I attended day care, on the day it snowed and I jammed my hands in my pockets, where they remained when I slipped and broke the fall with my face.

Sometimes on the road to Augusta, I think about my parents, freshly arrived in Aiken with two small kids, strangers to a part of the country where everyone drawls maaaaaaaaaam and many stores still close on Sundays and adults admonish children to refer to their teachers as Miss Christina, a habit that I try to break in my college students now.

The route goes through a few small towns, the kind with a Dairy Queen and a handful of gas stations. On one lawn were three convenience-store displays, the kind that you can spin like lazy susans, complete with single-serving bags of chips clipped into place. The sign: FOR SALE/B.O. One town's water tower proclaims it the bird dog capital of the world, a distinction that seems self-appointed. I opened the sunroof. The air was warm, and the cotton fields were starting to puff white. At one small airport, the planes whirred, a man ducking as he removed the blocks from the wheels.

I stopped at the Costco, decided I would, in fact, be the sort of person who bought flannel shirts off the table. While I tried them on over my t-shirt, someone ganked my cart. I sampled the chana masala and liked my recipe better. I priced beer and stomach meds. I bought tenderloins, and big packages of provolone, and bagels, looked down, realized my cart was my father's.

(In January, when the B and I bought this Costco membership in order to purchase our new mattress, we came in on a Saturday morning. He's never been to a warehouse store, and a Saturday morning is obviously the busiest time, everyone wrestling oversized shopping carts and pausing to cram tiny hot dogs into their mouths. He looked a little startled. But for me, it felt just like those high school weekends in Amherst during the 1990s, my father and I making the rounds to BJ's and Wegmans, our carts filled with pork and cheese for homemade pan pizza. This is how we function: he shows me how to walk through fields of cows, and I show him how to navigate suburban hellscapes.)

And after Costco, I took Walton Way across town, past the university and the mansions, the road curving around the pines. As I headed downtown, the mansions were replaced by gas stations and pawn shops. Over the canal and in the little shopping district. I walked up to Farmhaus Burger. I ate my chili dog and sweet potato tots outside, watched four guys brunch, complaining that the pimento cheese wasn't as good as they remembered. Another little family fed their dropped fries to the golden retriever at the other table. Tourists wandered the streets. The talking crosswalk had a Southern accent. The sun felt warm on my yellow cardigan.

I was alone. I was content.

There is a certain kind of aloneness that I'm used to, that I miss if I go too long without it. It's not loneliness, which I knew too well during those first months in Mankato, or that hard year out of grad school, or that year I lived in the murphy bed apartment in Michigan. Those were hard times, not knowing if they'd end or stretch on for years yet. Those were lonely times.

But aloneness is different. Aloneness is nice. It gives me time to think through the minor annoyances of the week past and sort them out; lets me listen to the same track eight times in a row, rewinding it each time the spot right before the drums kick in; lets me drive with the window down and the air whistling through the car, too loud for conversation anyway.

Aloneness is a safe and structured time. At home, there is a husband and dog waiting for me, and the same old fires to put out in my inbox, and the little life I've built for myself. The same five-mile walking loop through town and trivia at the bar on Tuesdays. I love my routines. I build them because they comfort me. I will return to them soon enough. But sometimes on a Saturday, it is nice to be alone, to be a stranger for a few hours, finding my way around a city I don't really know, enjoying the first day of fall.