This morning

This morning, as I'm driving to a conference in Raleigh, I'm thinking about the lovely conversation I've just had with Mom, and the pitfalls of aging, and yet how well she's doing in spite of it all, and the tragedy of lives cut short, and how much I depend on Google, and when it tells me to turn left on some winding road, when all the lemmings are going straight, but slowly because the traffic is horrendous, and I wonder if I'd be crazy to turn left on the winding road, or crazy like a fox, but I'm already late, because 10 minutes from home I turned around to make sure I'd turned off the stove, even though I was 99 percent sure I had, but that 1 percent, so what the hell I turned left down the winding road, past mcmansions on postage stamp lots, and then mini-mcmansions on even smaller lots, and then the massive gym they all drive to to work out, and I was thankful for our tiny house, with miles of hiking trails out the back door, and woods where I can harvest meat and heat, and thankful to the engineers who designed my Nissan Titan, and the workers who built it, and thankful to Google for taking me down the winding road to remind me of all this, and for my Mom and friendships and foggy mornings on winding roads and Christmas music.