"Where in the Sam Hell are we?"

I must have been in deep thought on my commute to work this morning, like a dream. Something poked at me, like a poke in a dream of the night, to make you wonder if there is a real world out there, and you happen to open your squinty eyes and see a pale blue light in a window next to your bed, and you go back into the dream world for a few more minutes.

Something poked at me, a never seen yellow glow, alien stands of tall pines along a forgotten highway. I came back into this world. Oh my gosh, these are not the trees I see on the way to work! I looked at the clock. Oh my gosh, I'm ten minutes late to work! I waited for a mile marker to give me some sense of where I was. Oh my gosh, I'm almost to Montgomery! I missed my exit by several miles and never noticed it.

We were going to Granny's. It was getting dark. I had some chicken tenders, hash brown cassarole, and some fried side like okra or something. We left Cracker Barrel. When we pulled into that dark gravel driveway, the two narrow tire paths winding through the tall bahiagrass, lined on both sides by old oaks and cedars, that driveway to Mema's homeplace, far off the road, that house she had known for nearly a century - the headlights spotted the white house with the tin roof and the long porch with green carpet and two white swings facing each other from the ends. And there was that white arched trellis Granny made to look like one she saw in Atmore in the 1930s. And the low stone wall and the four brick-encircled oaks and the old English boxwood and the iron pole could be seen in the periphery of the headlight. Mema had been quiet on the whole two hour journey to this place, her mama's home. And, as we came to see, her memory was beginning to fade, for when we stopped at the front door, she broke her silence, from the back seat she spoke in an uncharacteristic loud shrill irritated voice. "Where in the Sam Hell are we?"