Drove the night

Drove the night to Maine. Rainbow north of I-84 just past Hartford. Old Testament longings, belongings--what Vaughn packed in her frog backpack that we let her pack for herself: fuzzy yellow weed flower, shrivelled; Jakers coloring book & fresh pack of Crayola crayons; her orange calculator; her frog calculator; yellow fork from her plastic kitchenette set; address book/notepad; small, rainbow-colored basketball; little sheep figurine; two post-its with "notes" on them; Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds, which I hadn't realized she packed when I said "Oh, we should have brought the bird book." Light traffic, cruising just above sea level, eighty-five under tunnels, over bridges (50+% chance of faultiness) into sunshower, a small mass of dark clouds displace the earlier backlit clouds--old cellulite of clouds on the horizon. Stop at Old Sturbridge to pee, stretch back, snack on granola bars and raisins, gulp bottled water under moving clouds, then quick back on the road, into the night. A couple hours into this trip and kids strangely still awake when a half-hour drive's enough to knock them out. Through the road construction, bumpy surface, glump-glump tires, high road noise of the Civic, lane shifts ahead just around the bend, Dash throws up, "Projectile vomit," KC says, keeping an eye on him as I slow to sixty and get over to the right lane in case we need a quick exit from this shoulderless stretch. Sour milk smell fills the car, we lower the windows, pushing on--O puddle of puke. We pull off into the next rest stop. Vaughn's finally conked out. KC and I clean the car seat with baby wipes, but we know there'll be no ridding of the smell tonight. Light sleeper like his mom, gets carsick like his mom. Just hope he keeps eating his veggies like his mom, not like me and Vaughn. Long second stretch of the ride up into Maine, Dash's whimpers alternating with his quick loud little noises, punctuating silences. O hour of nothing with your black trees, heavy lights, and heavier eyelids. Wipers on, wipers off; wipers on, wipers off. The exits in Connecticut come one right after the other but not here in Maine. Finally, we reach the exit we need, take a few turns until we're on the Post Road and find the condos where we'll be staying. Meme and Aunt Colleen are waiting for us. No parking spaces open; they say "OK to park on the grass." Vaughn wakes up and Meme carries her inside. Vaughn bounces up and down on the air mattress on the floor. We say "Quiet, your cousins are sleeping." Dash crawls all over the mattress getting himself briefly stuck under the coffee table pushed against the wall. It takes a while but finally everyone settles down. I start off on the sofa; KC, Vaughn, and Dash on the mattress. But Vaughn wants me next to her so I try the floor, and soon I'm squeezing onto the mattress. Dash gets his third or fourth wind and starts crawling all over the place again. Vaughn wants me to get between them so I move inside and she slides to the end. Then Dash crawls over me and KC follows him and I end up on the other end. Dash keeps bopping everyone on the head and laughing so KC moves up to the sofa with him, leaving Vaughn and me on the mattress. We decide to play rock-scissors-paper. We can barely see so we have to push our hands together to see who wins. We play the best of seven. I take the first "throw" with rock-breaks-scissors. The second throw is a paper-paper tie. After that Vaughn wins the next four throws doing something she had never done before: changing her throw each time. "Let's play word association," she says, and so we do. "Dog," I say; "song," she says. "Moon," I say; "flower," she says. "Sun," I say; "rain," she says. "Cloud," I say; "rain," she says. "Seagull," I say; "cardinal," she says. After this, the game devolves into nonsense syllables I can't quite recall. Soon we are tossing and turning ourselves to sleep on the lumpy air mattress. I wake up frequently with dreams I think I'll recall in the morning but of course I won't. I remember only the one bit of a dream where I was with my family in some kind of lodge with a deck out back and a sliding glass door, and pacing out there was Jordan Davis, someone I've never met and only know of as one of the editors of The Hat and someone who who written some poems I’ve enjoyed, and anyway he's out there, looking like D.H. Lawrence, wanting to kill me, but only in a nonchalant "maybe I will, maybe I wont" kind of way.