Tears streamed for a while, but Anne was tough deep down. She wound through the Friday afternoon worker traffic and onto the expressway headed out of the city. It was about a three hour drive to Hammond, the small town her friend Kelly had moved to after meeting a guy from there and falling in love and all that stuff. Anne sniffled as another tear rolled down, and she drove on.

There was an expressway exit that left about half an hour of travel on a minor country road with cows and horses grazing, and fields sown to sunflowers and corn. One field was interesting. It was strewn with bales of straw. They were absolutely everywhere. The scene struck Anne with a weird familiarity; almost a poignancy. She slowed and pulled over to watch a farmer loading the bales onto a huge trailer. They were the big round bales, and he had a tractor with two prongs that speared underneath and lifted.

Anne got out of her car for a stretch while she watched the guy at work. He was an old man. He waved with a big smile and she waved back. An old woman arrived on a four-wheeler, to bring him something to eat and drink. She also waved over and smiled.

Past a small grove of trees there was a cluster of broken down timber buildings that struck Anne with the same weird sense of pathos. There was a gate to an overgrown driveway. It looked like it may have once been a little farm, but there was no house.

As Anne rolled on past the gate, she saw that it had a heavy chain wound around it with a big rusty padlock. There may well have been a house once. There was something she couldn't quite see that looked like foundations poking up through long grass. She was rolling slowly along the edge of the road, peering around at other buildings in the distance that also looked familiar. There was a tree line that she somehow knew was a creek with a deep, cool swimming hole. That picture flashed to mind as she stopped again and just relaxed, closing her eyes.




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