Yesterday I drove Celia to campus after a quick Easter visit. We left before dawn and I was back in my home office as the work day started.

A drive that early seems almost not to have happened. As the hours passed, as I wrote and edited and answered e-mails, snatches of those highway moments  slipped into my brain unbidden, like the vaporous trails of dreams scarcely remembered upon waking.

Was I really just rounding the curve after the split? Did I zoom over the Patuxent River, which I vow to explore more thoroughly every time I cross it? Was that lumbering car trailer alongside me for far too much of the way? The tunnel, the straightaway, the toll booth? Yes, yes and yes.

But by nightfall those early hours had left a weariness in my bones. The morning drive was real, for sure. Today, just the usual jaunt on Metro, a much tamer way to start the day.

(This is not the road to Baltimore.)