Long Winter Drive. | Allison DeRosia

This was a writing prompt in one of my classes this semester. so I thought I would share this here.

---

They told you to bottle up a memory. They told you to dig deep into every corner of your mind and pick one to pour it into a jar and keep it forever. 
Of course, there are those summer days as a kid when you wake up to the sound of your neighbors mowing their lawn and the smell of laundry wafts through the air because your mom had been working at it long before you awoke. The warm air you breathe in when you chase your younger brother with the hose before you inevitably got yelled at. Those days when you had nowhere to go, and no one to see. You simply split up your time between the muddy grass and the floor of your bedroom writing stories.
But there were those long winter drives. Seven in the morning down the road that was hardly better than its former gravel self. Fresh snow fell and stuck to the trees where the flakes held onto every branch like it was where they were always meant to fall. The world seemed to still on those drives. With coffee in hand and an acoustic love song that makes you miss someone you never had. 
You drive by the smoking chimneys and warm lit windows of lives you will never know. Pass that deep green painted house with the porch you envy, their lights still out. There was a peace in that moment that you wish you could travel back to. The magic in the trees covered in snow and the footprints to the mailboxes. 
The thought of pulling over to one of the homes and envelope yourself into a blanket in front of the fire as the morning commuters passed by. The idea of staying put and holding still with the morning and the house where the floors creak and the door upstairs never seems to shut just right. Or the leaky faucet you never get around to fixing. Or learning the sound of the howling wind at night as it beats against the fragile windows. Or the sound of the crunchy snow as you step out to your car because you're running late and hadn’t expected the snow that danced in overnight.
 Simply bottle up where your imagination had taken you on that drive. The long winding road you loved despite the early morning. The cool-toned moments just before the sun would rise.
 The road taught you to love mornings in a way you hadn't before. In a way that made you want to take the memory buried so deep in my heart and ring it out into a jar so others could fall in love with what wasn't even theirs. Just like you had on those long winter drives.