Driven To -and- Fro
I am 8 years old. My heart is firmly planned in my throat. The warm breeze from the open front seat windows hits the thin plastic of the dry cleaning bags and makes them buzz like a nest of angry hornets. I am all at once terrified, heartbroken, and confused. My stomach starts to hurt. My chest gets tighter with each passing mile. I sit, sweating and smothering, between a full rack of plastic wrapped dresses and a poorly designed quadrilateral backseat car window that folds out instead of rolling down. The Dallas suburbs gradually give way to open Texas prairie before performing a subtle transformation into the hills and pines of northeastern Texas. My pulse is racing. This is the familiar route to our assigned feast site of Big Sandy, but the Feast of Tabernacles is still months away. My mother hangs on every word of an unfamiliar voice emanating from our car's cassette player. The man speaks words I can't quite make out over the sounds of buzzing pl...