(Untold Pretties)

It started raining just as I dropped her off at her car
The sun was on the cusp of rising
And it was still cool from the late winter
But the days were now warming into spring time
She walked halfway to the car
Then turned around, looked at me and smiled
Then ran back to my window as I rolled it down
For her to stick her head in and kiss me one more time
Then ran back in the rain to her car
Get in and drive off
I sat there for a time and the rain started
To drizzle into my opened window
Sitting in the parking lot of the Southern Touch, thinking
As far as I’m concerned it was the last time I ever saw her
On the drive out to the funeral
To bury my gran’daddy it began to snow
Growing up in North Alabama it seldom snowed
Sometimes a couple of years would go by
Sometimes it might snow twice in a season
But it was still a novelty
The sky was as gray as an open chord
And as plaintive as fog in black and white
My gran’daddy always liked snow
And somehow I did too
The drive was out the old Savannah highway
Which was still two lane then
We wind around dead man’s curve
Where that lady from the Sunbeam
Bread wrapper was killed in a head on
Back when I was little
Out past our family’s farm
To the little Methodist church
Where once upon a time
My grandmother had gone to Sunday school
The same humble structure that witnessed
Their marriage of forty two years
And where just a few years ago I’d gone to Youth group
And Methodist Youth Foundation camp outs
Hay rides and lock-ins
Maybe I thought about that sad snowy
Morning and burying my gran’daddy
Those few years later, as I drove home in the rain
Home to my fiancee’s bed
Just a few weeks shy of getting married
With the taste of an old high school
Sweetheart lingering on my lips and fingers
And the rain started pouring down
Out of the sky like a wonderful wrath from God
A God who might spite me
Even as I turned from His grasp and shunned His embrace
I was plotting an escape that I was still
A few years away from having the guts to pull off
Years later that realization became a personal hell
That followed me around for a while
And then didn’t any more
You can only carry hell around
So long before it gets to be a drag