I really didn’t think I’d make it this year.

I never take vacation, never go on long solo trips by myself. I dreamed about it, but there is a very dim line between wanting to be alone and being lonely. Long trips usually mean a car full of siblings stuffed so close one must resort to covering ones eyes and making believe they are not there. I did not know how trips alone would be simply because I’d never taken them. I did not know if I’d relish the quiet or be lonely. Quiets aren’t often lonely, but certain things can be. My first solo trip was across the state of Wyoming to work on a ranch I’d never been to, with people I’d never met, and spelled adventure certainly but not a trip to see a friend and a wonderful new place I’d never been. It was all new, this freedom to go where I wanted, do what I please. Usually I was sharing it with somebody else.

I woke up slow on a Saturday morning and knew there wasn’t really a rush to get out the door. I made coffee and finished packing my car, made sure I had all I needed. Had breakfast with the parents. I decided that this was what was called “Making your own way in the world.”

Mama wished me well and watched me drive away as she always does. I didn’t really tell anybody I was going anywhere. I unplugged from it all, facebook, instagram, and I just went. I got a mocha in a little Nebraska college town and drove.

They were harvesting the corn. Long lines of grain trucks rolled by slow and easy, and shorn off fields with only the highway cutting through looked pretty much like a way of life well lived and good. A week later when I came back they were harvesting potatoes under steel gray skies, great mounds piled high on the roadside and trucks still making passes, trying to beat the snow coming sure.

There were sometimes on the back roads on the way to Grandma’s it was only me and the coal trains and the thunderous sounds off the tracks. Then cattle and lonesome blue ponds in afternoon sunshine, deepened by October. Amidst some hard changes at work and the after effects of a summer no one couldn have imagined, a clear path down an empty road came like a whisper, a beauteous stillness, and my heart kind of sighed happy.

There really wasn’t room to be lonely. There really wasn’t time. There were audio books and my favorite playlists, but voices weren’t things I needed. The emptiness of the road was all that seemed to satisfy the noise in my head, and with each mile it disipated—the sounds, the rough memories, the losses, old ways, old thoughts—just passed right on by. I left them far behind and I wouldn’t be coming back for them. They’re lost somewhere in the sandhills and the endless corn fields now fallow with autumn.

The only thing I dislike about driving is you can’t just keep on watching the prairie go by. But the thing I like about driving is you have to stop and take a longer look.

Me and Nebraska go way back. My mama’s girlhood was spent here, on the farmland and with the cornfields, a simple life. I’ve got this little ache in me that knows this is where I come from, and the people here are my people.

Sometimes all I have to do to remember the humanity in the world is drive through the heartland with the fields of golden grain and the old family farm houses, and see that there is still a good life to be lived. I don’t know why, but it’s got to be something in my blood that runs deep.

I spent that night at my grandma’s, a Nebraska farm girl born and raised. I didn’t get out the camera, didn’t take any pictures. It was just me and Grandma, and it’s never like this, me being able to sit alone with her and just listen and just talk. And maybe that’s why I had this warm feeling in my heart all evening, just sitting and watching Hallmark movies with her.

When you’re young and you look at old folks you almost see a meaningless existence, the slow old bones, the complete lack of ambition and imagination to do absolutely anything. You almost want to pray, Oh God, don’t let this be my fate, because how would this ever be enough? How can they live this way?

But sitting there in my grandpa’s old green recliner from the 70s, the one in old photos of him sleeping, stretched out, and me curled in his lap, I’m watching my grandma beside me and looking at a woman who never held back on life, not a bit of it.

And there’s something I knew then that I’ll never forget, and it goes along with everything I’ve been thinking lately about growing old and passing things on to the young.

Someday there will come a point in life when we will just sit and be and watch a Hallmark show. And it will be enough.

It’s like in the John Denver song, “My life is worth the living, I don’t need to see the end.” I don’t have to look ahead in my life to when I’m old and grey and my bones are tired and wonder if it’s worth it. John Denver said it right, I don’t need to see the end to know my life’s gonna be worth living, old or young. It’s all there, in my grandma’s blue eyes, in her smile, in the age old wedding ring she wears like it’s a part of her hand.

The next morning, in the dark before dawn, my grandma held me, and she prayed for me, and I cried, and there was part of me that didn’t want to leave her there alone. But her prayers went with me into the sunrise, and followed in my footsteps wherever I went, because that’s what a good God does for the young of His people, He gives you the old to send you away into life with prayers, because they don’t need to see the end either to know the good of life that will come to you as it came to them, when they were young and restless, and the old of their day sent them off with prayers, too, so long ago.