Some mornings, particularly on days when a car is in the shop, I walk to work and then make adjustments to my schedule accordingly. Since I tend to be an early riser, fairly often I get started before the sun rises, and I have learned which of the neighborhood dogs mind their own business, where the walnuts will be on the sidewalk when I might miss seeing them, and even, lately, some of the disturbing names people assign their wifi networks between my home and my job. I get about an hour of thinking in, writing rough drafts of material in my mind, figuring out how to handle a particularly thorny meeting, planning new projects, and hoping to see or hear something that provides just a moment of taking me out of the everyday routine.
This morning, as I was crossing the railroad tracks near old downtown Johnson City, I saw the relatively flat land between me and East Tennessee State University, and it occurred to me that the gritty feel of the dirt was of about the same consistency of the sandy soil in my hometown, Cullman, and in Tuscaloosa, and the traces along some of the highways in eastern North and South Carolina, and northern Georgia, too. It was just a flash of recognition, and then I was thinking about an experience as a boy, when a ball rolled into the weathered clapboard garage on my family's lot, and how I ducked into it to grab the ball, stood up, and saw that I had ducked under an orb web bigger around than I could reach. There, in the center, was what appeared to me to be the biggest spider I had ever seen. It did not move as I ducked back under the web and scooted away from the garage.
Only the sound of the gravel and gritty dirt, like the driveway in our backyard, prompted that memory.
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