On the Road to Indiana

Dear journal, 

The road had that late-December stillness to it this morning, the kind that comes when the calendar insists on moving forward while the body lingers behind. My brother and I loaded the truck not just with boxes, but with the unspoken understanding that this drive was about more than delivery. It was the last stretch of Christmas break, that narrow footbridge between rest and responsibility, and we decided, almost without saying so, to take the long way.

We stopped first at El Dorado Springs, a town that has always felt slightly out of time, as if it never fully accepted the modern insistence that everything must be efficient. The springs themselves carry the language of healing in their name, and standing near them, watching the water emerge and move on, I was struck by how deeply human that impulse is. That impulse to believe that water can take something from us if we let it. I do not know what the water heals, exactly, but I know what it invites: pause, reflection, and the permission to breathe without explaining why. After weeks of sorting, labeling, and deciding the fate of a life condensed into objects, that invitation mattered.

From there, the day unfolded easily. We wandered through a couple of college campuses, the kind of places that always hum with future tense. Buildings stood ready for students who were not yet there, classrooms waiting patiently for voices, questions, ambitions. Campuses have a way of reminding me that endings and beginnings often share the same physical space. As someone who has spent a life orbiting education, I find comfort in that continuity. Learning persists even when particular lives end; the work simply waits for the next generation to arrive.

Food anchored the afternoon. There is something profoundly grounding about a good meal on the road. It's nothing ceremonial, nothing forced, just the shared act of sitting down and eating. It is one of the quieter ways we take care of each other, and today it felt like an extension of the larger task at hand: tending to family bonds while carrying grief in manageable portions.

Tomorrow will be heavier. We will meet my cousin, not as children at a holiday gathering, but as adults navigating the aftermath of loss. We will visit the resting place of my aunt, my grandmother’s daughter, a woman whose absence has echoed through this season in ways both obvious and subtle. It will be a sad reunion, shaped by what is no longer possible, but it will also be an honest one. I am grateful for that. Grief isolates easily; it convinces us to keep moving past one another. Choosing to show up, to drive the distance, to stand together in quiet places, is a refusal to let that happen.

As the day closed, I realized that this small road trip had done something important. It reminded me that inheritance is not only what we divide and distribute. It is also the habit of stopping at springs, of lingering on campuses full of promise, of sharing meals before difficult conversations. These are the softer legacies, harder to inventory but far more durable. Tomorrow we will face sorrow directly. Today, we practiced how to carry it together.

Always, 

Dave