I Can Still Smell the Pomegranates Grow

Lots of people find that their most reflective moments come in the most peculiar of places.

I am one of those people. For me, that place is the driver’s seat of my car. And the moments come whether I want them to or not.

They rush by me like the white dashes of I-85 through Charlotte, new questions pouring into my soul with the flickering of skyscraper lights. A young lawyer paces by a window, pen in hand and scribbling, up late preparing her first brief. A janitor, whose age shows in the quiet deliberativeness with which he searches every area, sweeps the halls of the Bank of America building. And I sweep out the halls of my heart.

They blindside me while rumbling along on the cracked Confederate-gray pavement of SC-301 from Olanta to Turbeville, where sunsets of orange and maroon create a chorus of dancing tobacco leaf silhouettes in fields that touch the sky with endlessness. A young girl in pigtails reaches on tiptoes at her mailbox, turning with a handful of white to walk back down the rust-colored dirt road to her family’s small homestead. And the local quartet of grandfathers, effortlessly puffing and repacking their pipes, sway back and forth in the weathered wooden rocking chairs outside of JD’s Qwick Stop, some of them intermittently taking swigs of the 8-ounce Cokes resting cold on the ground at their feet. And I, I sip from the humble chalice of peripheral, subsidiary existence.