Highway 79

For nearly fifty years, I've been traveling back and forth to Georgia--and my parents used to make this trip twice a year by car. We decide each time whether to take the Southern Route (Interstate 10 mostly) or the Northern Route,  35, then 79, then I 20.  Highway 79--from Hutto to Marshall--is the best stretch.

Carlene was usually in the driver's seat when they made this car trip, and she could make the whole trip, door to door, in 17 hours.  I guess I got my love of driving from her--though it was my daddy who cautioned me to keep both hands on the wheel, my eyes on the road, and all the doors locked.

I got up at three yesterday, left my house around 4, and drove to Ruston, Louisiana.  A drive through rural landscapes, especially during the hour when the sun is just lighting the fringe of the horizon, is magical. Even old crumbling houses and barns, unremarkable or even downright ugly in the full light of day, are beautiful against the canvas of morning sky. Mist rises from ponds and lakes, and I stop and snap pictures of reflections shimmering on the surface of water.

There's also a sad side to driving Highway 79.  I can remember when these towns were vibrant and busy, but many of them have gone dormant since the advent of Wal-Mart and chain gas stations.  Some are veritable ghost towns.  Countless store front windows are papered and boarded over, and windows are scrawled with hand-written signs, Closed. Barber poles, neon signs, big brass cash registers, pharmacies and soda fountains--these relics have been abandoned or moved to the warehouses of collectors.

I did find one little town that is being refurbished--and I talked for a while to the man who's buying all the old buildings and turning them into restaurants and stores.   He ripped the paneling from the interior of the bank and took out the low plaster ceiling to reveal an ornate one of silver ceiling tiles; he kept the original wood and marble.  The lone teller there is a woman (probably in her nineties) who's been working there for sixty-five years!

I had a delicious lunch at the Pint and Barrel in old town Palestine and met the wife of the head of the Chamber of Commerce who owns a little shop of vintage treasures.  I bought a piece of buttermilk pie in the Old Town pie shop and watched as the owner packaged up a huge assortment of freshly-baked pies in white boxes--lemon, cherry, chocolate, pecan, pumpkin, and buttermilk with or without pecans.

Driving Highway 79 evokes memories of a simpler and more vivid time when every town and neighborhood  had its own identity, as Old Town Palestine still does, not absorbed in chain-everything homogeneity.

A black and white cow is grazing in the front yard of the white house.  Horses stand still as statues in groves of pecan and pine trees. I feel like I'm driving through the past, a world hidden in the fog of time.