"Interchange"

I am driving in my car slowly, the tires making dull thuds into the potholes, like small craters in the earth that are the remnants of winter's salt. Dried, brown leaves dart across the cragged pavement in the blustery beginning of spring. They remind me of tiny children running and jumping across the schoolyard, escaping their prison on the last day of classes. The sun fractures through the leafless trees somehow bright and soft simultaneously. I squint my eyes to its luminance to look upon the sky crystalline and blue like the waters of a warm ocean I have never seen. Clouds crawl like tortoises, their great humped backs like stepping-stones across a small, babbling creek. There is an old man with gray whiskers on his dilapidated bicycle in front of me, his frail, skinny leg a kickstand. He is still dressed for winter and his navy coat is stained with many years of misuse. His dingy, orange knit cap pulled tightly to his skull makes me think of aging, makes me think of the degradation of the human body over time, how year by year we lose fat and sinew as our bodies require less and less of us to survive. I lament the fact that each day spent living is another day spent dying, that each moment experienced is a moment of the past. The interchange so minute that we don’t begin to see it until it is too late. Aleathia Drehmer 2007