Steady, humming rains, steady as Maryland. They leave the roads all dewy and sprawling across fields and farms that stay damp for days, even after the sun returns. Mountaindale Road is one of those quintessential country roads that stays lush year-round—under storms, under feet of snow. Open fields span its foreground, which gives way to houses, gardens, a convenience store … a winding road, shaded by tree canopy, that shoots out across corn and soy fields and cattle farms, eventually leading to a highway. A road whose every dip and curve I know.
I drove this road through winter, spring, summer, and fall, though the subtle changes in the land suggested more seasons than that. The field of red poppies change from burnt orange to muddy brown to stark ice and white. The trees go from eager, bright buds to waving greens to tired and spent elders that droop toward the ground. Every few weeks, a new feeling here, anchored by the rusted-out trucks and buses that sit in side yards and the tin roofs of barns that tilt to glint the sun.
And Mount Briar Road, a beeline, summer-day kind of road that edges along the base of Red Hill and for years took me to an 1800s farmhouse and its large yard, where I grew garlic and squash in its red soil, there with Civil War bullets and ghosts. Bunches of chicory dot the roadside with blue specks every spring, Virginia creeper swallows whole barns and old wooden sheds, and Little Antietam Creek flows its humble stream through hayfields near old train tracks overgrown with grass.
And those small roads through one-stoplight towns, through one-lane covered bridges and grassy pastures, and my day-job office in Frederick and city street in Baltimore, with the graffitied alleyway behind my apartment, where I parked my car, where I picked up nails that flattened my tires over and over again.
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