I had been on the road since before dawn, rolling east on county blacktop that uncoiled through the hills like a length of knotted rope. Mile after mile, Josie’s two‑liter heart kept its brittle tempo—thrum‑thrum‑thrum—while my own thoughts wandered farther than the tires ever would. Out there a man has time to weigh himself against the horizon and come away small, a dust mote hitchhiking on the breath of America. When the green shield that read Siloam Springs—Next Right flashed by, I felt the sudden, inexplicable tug a traveler knows: slow down, turn in, see what waits.

Siloam Springs sits exactly where Arkansas ends and possibility begins, half river‐town, half college borough, with one foot planted in yesterday’s red clay and the other testing the quicksand of tomorrow. Fewer than two thousand souls in 1893; a handful more than seventeen thousand now. Numbers swell and contract like lungs, yet Main Street keeps its brick corset laced tight. I nosed Josie into the historic district just as morning slipped, unnoticed, into noon.

The town felt poised—like a stage set moments before the curtain lifts. Barricades angled across the cross‑streets; children scurried with fistfuls of miniature flags; an old collie, gray about the muzzle, tugged at its leash as if it too sensed the imminence of spectacle. I eased the van to the curb beside an apothecary storefront whose beveled glass still bore the gold‑leaf letters of yesteryear. Josie’s engine clicked down into silence. The parade, they said, would begin any minute.

I stepped out beneath a sky the color of boiled tin. November light, pale as skimmed milk, washed over brick façades and left the mortar lines glowing. The wind smelled of wood‑smoke and distant sycamore leaves moldering in the gullies east of town. Down the block a volunteer in an orange vest directed traffic with the serene authority that only belongs to small‑town officials and old barn cats. I asked him what was happening.

“Veterans Day, mister. We parade every year—rain, shine, or politics.” He grinned, tipped a sweat‑darkened ball cap, and waved the next pickup into a church lot.

I joined the line of townsfolk edging the curb. There was no crush, no elbowing for vantage, only an easy choreography—families with thermoses, elders bundled in surplus army coats, college kids from John Brown University clasping latte cups and curiosity. A grandmother unfolded a lawn chair with the reverence of pitching a tent on holy ground. Beside her a toddler tottered in circles, plastic Army helmet cocked over one ear. We waited, all of us, strangers knitted together by anticipation.

The parade announced itself first as a tremor in the pavement—bass drum reverberation riding up through the soles of my battered New Balance sneakers. Then came the color guard. Four firefighters in dress blues, buttons shining like coins at the bottom of a creek, advanced with the stars and stripes held high. Their polished shoes struck the bricks in perfect cadenced taps. No band yet, only boot heels and the whistle of wind sliding down W University St.

Behind them rumbled a flatbed draped in bunting, the edges fluttering like wounded swallows. Seated on hay bales were men whose posture betrayed both pride and pain: a Korean War radio operator with a scar notched across his cheek; two Vietnam combat engineers, shoulders squared despite the decades; a Gulf War nurse, her uniform jacket tailored neatly against new motherhood weight. They waved in that tentative, hesitant way veterans often do—as if still unsure they deserve the fuss. The crowd surged with applause, loud enough to drown the quiet things we never say.

Then the band turned the corner and poured itself into Main Street. Clarinet reeds squeaked, trombones lagged a half‑beat, but the drummer, a ruddy‑cheeked lad with freckles like gunpowder, kept the line marching true. They battered out “Anchors Aweigh” and the melody ricocheted between sandstone walls, rising into the overcast like a challenge to the sun itself.

Halfway through the procession a 1942 Willys Jeep chugged by, olive drab paint flaking at the fenders, windshield down, the driver in full WWII field garb despite the chill. Riding shotgun sat a woman of ninety‑one—hair pinned, lips crimson, eyes bright with mischief. A poster taped to the hood proclaimed Rosie the Riveter Rides Again. She flexed a bicep no bigger than a cornstalk, and the crowd roared its delight.

No float for a homecoming queen, none needed. The royalty this day wore campaign ribbons and orthopedic shoes.

I watched, notebook forgotten, as the parade wound toward the river bridge where it would disband. For twenty minutes the world shrank to the width of Main Street: one slender ribbon of bricks, border‑stitched by citizens who understood that gratitude grows best in the soil of remembrance.

When the last cadence faded, life resumed with small clatters. Barricades were dragged aside, shop doors propped open, and toddlers coaxed toward minivans. A kind of resonance lingered. The way a plucked guitar string hums long after the fingertip lifts. I stood a while in that after-music, letting it settle into the traveling spaces inside me.

Siloam Springs carries history the way old trees carry lightning scars. There are stories in every mortar gap: of Choctaw traders who once cooled their horses in Sager Creek, of prohibition agents smashing stills during the hard dry years, and of a flash flood in ’74 that crippled 40 businesses. The locals will tell you these tales if you show the courtesy of listening. On this afternoon, the bricks themselves seemed to speak—names chiseled into pavers by families who bought a square of sidewalk so their grandchildren would remember they too had walked here.

I wandered, sneakers scuffing fallen leaves, until the parade’s litter—candy wrappers, two crushed trumpet mutes, a stray flag ribbon—was all that remained. In the campus coffeehouse a trio of students argued Kierkegaard over cappuccino foam. Down at the barber shop three veterans compared medication dosages the way younger men compare horsepower. A train horn moaned from the western trestle, pulling a freight of grain and latched doors toward Tulsa.

Everywhere I turned, I felt the hinge where old meets new, solemn meets hopeful—the hinge every American town swings on if it is wise enough not to break.

At dusk I returned to Josie. Before climbing in, I reached behind the driver’s seat and withdrew a bundled stack of crisp twenties—held by a single red rubber band. Cash for the next stranger grace would reveal. I thumbed the edge, the bills whispering against one another like prairie grass. Somewhere ahead waited a pair of hands that needed this more than mine. The knowledge steadied me.

Engine lit, headlights carved twin tunnels through the settling fog, and we rolled away. In the mirror Siloam Springs dwindled to a glow, then to nothing at all, yet the echo of bugles and boot heels rode with me, soft as heartbeats beneath the van’s hum.

Miles later, beneath a sky now clear and brittle with stars, I caught myself smiling for no reason save this: that a small town had paused the machinery of its day so the living could honor the dead and the half-living could remember how to be whole. Some things, I decided, are worth more than distance, more than time, more even than a stack of twenties tucked behind a car seat.

And if roads are veins, carrying stories instead of blood, then let this be one of them: that on a gray November afternoon in Arkansas, the bricks of Main Street sang, and a traveler—dusty, road-weary, and not yet done—heard the song and believed again in the quiet, stubborn goodness of ordinary people.

There is a particular kind of darkness that clings to the soul. Not the honest darkness of night that whispers promises of dawn. This is a murky twilight where shadows take on weight and hope becomes a stranger. In Antlers, Oklahoma, a woman named Cate Gubanov knows this darkness all too well. At 32, she has lived and breathed it, allowed it to seep into her very bones until the taste of clean air and the warmth of unblemished sunlight are but distant memories.

They say every journey into the abyss starts somewhere else, in a different life where choices stand like open doors rather than sealed-off windows. Cate's story isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that shadowed road seeming as inevitable as the pull of gravity. The needle, the pipe, the pill—they all ride shotgun in her life and never relinquish their hold.

Cate's story isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that shadowed road seeming as inevitable as the pull of gravity.

But then Cate's path takes a turn that some might call miraculous, others perhaps a stubborn defiance of fate. Eight years prior, she accomplishes what many lost in the darkness swear cannot be done: she claws her way out. It isn't an abrupt escape—there is no grand epiphany, no sudden flood of celestial light. Instead, it is a slow, arduous crawl. Every nerve in her body screams betrayal. Every thought is consumed by an insatiable craving. Yet she presses on, stacking one minute on top of another until they form hours, days, weeks.

Emerging from the pit is one thing; knowing what to do once you're free is another. You can't linger on the edge with your legs dangling back into the void. Cate understands this with a clarity forged in suffering. She has seen too many tumble back, their brief sobriety swallowed by the familiar embrace of darkness. So she resolves to build something—a beacon for others lost in the twilight.

She starts small, as most important endeavors do. A program for women fresh out of jail, their eyes still glazed with the emptiness of confinement, their minds haunted by persistent demons. She names it Matthew 18 Ministries, drawing from a chapter rich with lessons of grace and forgiveness. She asks for one year of their lives—a year to relearn how to exist in the world of light.

The work is far from pretty. Most days, it feels like trying to grasp smoke with bare hands. The women who come to her bear more than just the scars of addiction; they carry histories etched in both visible and invisible wounds. Nights find Cate alone in her modest office, poring over case files that read like chronicles of despair, each page unearthing new layers of pain.

The work is far from pretty. Most days, it feels like trying to grasp smoke with bare hands.

She knows she will lose more battles than she'll win—that's the harsh reality. For every woman who completes the program, many will slip back into the shadows, drawn by the relentless pull of the very darkness they seek to escape. But those victories, when they come, shine like rare gems under a weary sun. A woman standing tall at her child's school play; another celebrating two years of sobriety, tears carving paths down her cheeks as she holds her token of triumph. These are the moments Cate treasures, the precious reminders she holds close on the hardest days.

Sometimes, they say, God speaks in whispers. For Cate, His voice cuts through the cacophony of her heart and the hollowed spaces of her soul left vacant by years of substance abuse. It isn't the gentle voice from childhood Sunday schools with their neatly lined chairs and paper crosses. This is the commanding voice that spoke to prophets—a voice that shatters and rebuilds.

She hadn’t been searching for God; in the depths of addiction, one ceases to search for anything beyond the next fix. But He finds her nonetheless, as He often finds those who have nowhere left to run. The miracle isn't just that she hears Him. It's that from some unscathed place within her, a quiet "yes" emerges. This surprises her more than the divine call itself.

Today, she walks the stark corridors of the county jail. Her footfall echoing against cold concrete floors worn smooth by countless weary shuffles. The women here exist in a state of limbo. Some will make bail and return to the lives that brought them here. Others await judgment; many are merely counting the days until they are transported to the grayer walls of prison.

Cate hasn't planned this path; she holds no degrees from esteemed seminaries. Her credentials are inked in faded track marks, her theology learned in the relentless night school of the streets. But there is power in that authenticity—in meeting an addict's gaze and seeing not just who they are, but who they were, and who they could become.

Her credentials were written in track marks, her theology
learned in the hardest kind of night school imaginable.

In the bare-bones meeting room of the jail, Cate listens as women unravel stories that could be mirror images of her own. The specifics vary—meth instead of heroin, a lover's influence instead of a misguided night—but the essence remains the same. Tales of an all-consuming hunger, of voids so vast they threaten to engulf everything.

Listening becomes her first ministry, perhaps her most vital one. She listens wholly, the way one listens to the wind before a storm. The way God might have listened, she says, when she herself was lost. She speaks without pretense or sugar-coated truths. She speaks in the raw, brutally honest language of someone who has walked through hell and somehow found the path back.

From these humble visits, her vision begins to take shape—a structured program where women can transition after jail, rather than being cast back into the streets and the arms of old temptations. A holistic approach that nurtures the soul while equipping them with the skills to rebuild shattered lives.

Construction has begun on housing that will shelter up to four women—a safe haven where they can begin anew. The dream stretches further: a village of such homes, a community where healing becomes a shared journey.

Cate is quick to acknowledge that she doesn't walk this path alone. Behind her stands a congregation, the Roundup Cowboy Church. It seems more like a rugged bunkhouse than a house of worship. You can tie your horse outside—and they do. Step into the sanctuary, and the pastor greets you with a warm "howdy" and a tip of his hat.

Pastor Jonathon Hooker, a man as steadfast as the oaks that dot the Oklahoma landscape, stands beside her. Straight from Central Casting, he is Cowboy through and through; from the brim of his hat to the worn leather of his boots, he offers not just spiritual guidance but the unwavering support of the church community.

Together, they've rallied a cadre of volunteers—men and women willing to lend their hands and hearts. These are folks who know the value of hard work and harder-earned wisdom. They'll teach practical skills, from balancing a checkbook to changing a tire, all while tending to the deeper wounds that need healing.

There's nothing grandiose about this network—no celebrity benefactors or glittering fundraisers. Just a group of steadfast souls who understand the steep price of redemption, many having paid it themselves in one form or another. They're ready to give what they can—time, expertise, compassion—to help women who have stared into the abyss and lived to tell the tale.

Cate carries the torch, mapping out plans and shouldering the daily grind. Yet she readily admits she couldn't do it without this community of saints and sinners alike. When it comes to pulling souls from the depths, it takes more than one set of hands—it takes a village willing to soil its hands in the messy work of grace.

Matthew 18 Ministries is not tidy. It is a rough gospel hammered together with sweat and second chances. But in a town that bills itself the Deer Capital of the World, a woman named Cate Gubanov is proving that some trophies do not hang on walls—they walk out the front door, upright, undefeated, and carrying the light forward for the next soul still wandering in the dark.

Her story may not be singular, but perhaps that's where its true power lies. It resonates with the struggles and triumphs of many, a collective testament to the enduring human capacity for change. Cate reminds us that miracles aren't always thunderous acts from the heavens. Sometimes, they emerge in the quiet, steadfast determination of a person who simply refuses to let the darkness prevail.

The map names it Antlers, but the Choctaw old‑timers still mouth softer words that slide off the tongue like water over limestone—Hokina Pishka, place of the young deer. You crest the last rise of Oklahoma State Highway 375 and there it lies—a crease of brick storefronts, two feed silos tilting into the blue, and beyond them a sweep of pine‑dark hills that look close enough to touch yet somehow older than Genesis. Population twenty‑five hundred on paper, fewer when the rodeo’s in Hugo, more when the Dogwood blossoms call cousins home. The green highway sign doesn’t bother with decimals; it simply nods and lets you roll on in.

I arrived on a Tuesday that smelled of wood‑smoke and wet cedar, Josie’s air‑cooled engine humming forty‑five in a fifty‑five zone, and quite content to do so. November had just flipped the calendar—corn already cut, winter wheat not yet sprouted—and the whole county felt paused between breaths. That pause is Antlers’ natural tempo. Even the red-and-white Chesapeake pump at the lone Conoco clicks slower here, like it despairs of rushing anyone.

Rails, Antlers, and Ancestry

Legend says a Katy Railroad section boss christened the depot by tacking shed antlers to every post he could nail, a frontier feng‑shui meant to ward off bad luck. The name stuck the way burrs stick to denim, and by 1890 a town grew around the rack‑ribbed station: drummers hawking patent medicines, Choctaw farmers hauling cotton bales, Scots‑Irish loggers felling short‑leaf for the sawmill’s hungry maw. The rails are gone now—torn up for scrap during Reagan’s years—but under the summer moon you can still see the ghost line, twin silver strands of dew slicing through Johnson‑grass like some phantom highway to elsewhere.

Pushmataha County holds pain the way clay holds water. The Choctaw were marched here on the Trail of Tears; their descendants stayed because leaving again felt like betraying the bones underfoot. Stories survive in porch‑talk and quilt patterns: how Pushmataha, the great chief, argued peace with Andrew Jackson yet carried a rifle tattooed with notches of necessity; how the tribe rebuilt council houses from river rock because timber rotted too fast in this fevered climate. Walk Main Street and you’ll catch Choctaw vowels braided into English talk—soft, round, deliberate, like creek water over smooth stones.

The Pulse of a Two‑Block Main

Main itself is barely two blocks long, angled to the railroad that birthed it. On the north end squats Smith’s Gun & Pawn, shelves stacked with dove loads and second‑hand dreams. Farther down,  MJay’s Diner leans into the corner, windows fogged with sausage steam. MJay’s serves catfish on Fridays, chicken‑fried on Sundays, and gospel every morning from a tinny AM radio by the griddle. Locals claim her coffee can strip rust off a tractor muffler; I drank three cups and felt sins fall away.

Out on 3rd street, the old Pushmataha Courthouse keeps vigil. Limestone blocks, WPA‑era steel casement windows, a clock tower whose hands snag at 2:17 whenever the humidity soars. The docket runs short these days—mostly timber‑trespass cases and pickups repossessed. Rumor has it that Judge Jana Kay Wallace still bangs the same walnut gavel her grand‑daddy used when bootleggers flooded the hills with ‘shine during Dust Bowl droughts. 

Deer Capital of the World – A Claim and a Covenant

“Deer Capital of the World,” the welcome sign brags, antlers curving like parentheses around the boast. Folks here treat whitetail the way coastal towns treat the tide—inevitable, sustaining, occasionally dangerous. Opening day of rifle season is second only to Christmas: school closes, the post office opens late, and pickup beds bristle with orange vests headed into the Kiamichi foothills. Success isn’t measured by Boone‑&‑Crockett points alone; it’s the freezer full of venison chili, the back‑strap grilled over blackjack coals, the jerky mailed to cousins stationed overseas. Hunting is provision, communion, and—ask any Choctaw elder—covenant: take what you need, leave the land able to make more.

Seasons Written in Small Things

October brings the annual Deef Festival. Attendees explode the town’s population six-fold. This wildlife-themed festival pours out onto Anters’ fairgrounds with craft tents, and fiddles that set sneakers tapping on cracked asphalt. There are displays of hunting and fishing equipment, a chili cook-off, live entertainment, and more, depending on whether the ladies' auxiliary managed to get the pie eating contest organized in time. I’m told a favorite event is a parade of kids dressed in field camouflage, all vying for the “Cutiest Kid in Camo” prize. There are Choctaw cultural exhibitions, a “mountain man tent,” a chainsaw carving competition, and a chuck wagon competition. 

 Autumn brings the county fair, where 4‑H kids show lambs shampooed cleaner than wedding linen and grandmothers duel in the pie salon, crusts flakier than gossip. Winter hushes the town under sable nights; wood‑stoves tick, fox tracks cross the football field, and the Baptist choir’s candlelight cantata glows through stained‑glass like a coal kept alive.

Hard Times & Holding Together

Antlers has known ruin. The Tornado of 1945 roared through at 10:00 p.m., shredding 328 buildings and killing 69 people—names still recited every April at the marble memorial by the depot park. Logging busts, cattle crashes, meth epidemics—they’ve all tried to hollow this place. Yet the town endures by the oldest arithmetic: subtraction of pride plus addition of neighbor. When a neighbor’s trailer burned, the VFW hall filled with casseroles and feed‑store envelopes fat with bills. When the Choctaw Health Clinic needed a bigger parking lot, Baptists and Methodists parked doctrine long enough to pour concrete side‑by‑side.

The Future Wears Work Boots

Progress ambles here, wary as a feral hog. Fiber‑optic cable runs under the courthouse lawn now, feeding laptops in the new co‑working space carved from the defunct Rexall drugstore. Choctaw artisans sell beaded medallions on Etsy, shipping from a post office that still hand‑cancels Christmas cards with a buck‑horn stamp. Wind turbines flicker on distant ridges; some ranchers bless the lease checks, others curse the spoilt view. Everyone agrees the cell signal still drops south of Moyers and that the creek needs dredging before next flood season.

FFA (Future Farmers of America) students test soil pH with smartphones; the marching band still practices formations that spell GO BEARCATS on Friday nights. Tradition and technology share lockers—sometimes uneasily, mostly with mutual respect.

A Night Beneath Kiamichi Stars

My last evening I parked Josie on an old logging spur five miles out, where the pines hush the wind and the universe comes closer. Coyotes stitched yips through the dark; somewhere a barred owl inquired, Who cooks for you? I boiled coffee on the camp stove and thought about roots—Choctaw, settler, long‑hauler like me just passing through. Antlers taught me roots are neither chains nor anchors; they’re cords braided through time, flexible enough to bend when storms lean hard.

At midnight the sky ripped open with meteors—silver sparks burning against indigo. I found myself whispering thanks: for towns that keep memory, for strangers who wave from porch swings, for deer tracks in red mud, for the stubborn mercy of a place that refuses to hurry. Josie creaked as the metal cooled and the coffee steamed away. In that hush I felt the road grow patient again. Tomorrow the tires would turn east toward Arkansas, but tonight Antlers held me, antler‑rack stars overhead, roots underfoot, story snug between.

A Passage Through Shadows

The map on the passenger seat quivered with each gust that slithered through the open window—thin autumn wind, smelling faintly of wheat stubble and diesel. I steered Josie west, toward a bruised horizon, the dashboard clock fixed on an early evening November hour that felt neither here nor there. Twilight was sliding in; day kept its promise to leave. Somewhere behind me, a hospice nurse was measuring morphine in teaspoons, and my sister was counting heartbeats that stuttered more than they beat. My mom had been granted “days, perhaps a week,” the sort of forecast that lands like a dull axe: you know the blow is coming, yet the mind refuses to picture the blade.

I drove on anyway.

She told me to.

“Keep going, Brock,” she’d rasped into the phone, each syllable ferried across a sea of static and shallow breaths. “Finish what you started. Don’t circle back to watch me fade away.”

There was a fierceness in that whisper. She had always been a woman who met the world at full draw—no warning shots, no half-measures. If life squared up for a fight, she tightened the strap on her purse and joined the melee, swinging words like iron. More warrior than nurturer, yes, but it was a brand of love as raw and trustworthy as barbed-wire fence: you leaned on it, you bled, and you never questioned its strength.

Now the warrior was shrinking—lungs invaded by three separate rebellions of cell and marrow, bones riddled, appetite a rumor. My sister described her voice like a candle about to gutter out: flame flinching, wick glowing soft red, wax pooling for the last time. I pictured hospice sunlight falling across quilts, morphine syringes lined like slender soldiers on a nightstand, and the hush that collects when everyone has said what can be said.

She had always been a woman who met the world at full draw—no warning shots, no half-measures. If life squared up for a fight, she tightened the strap on her purse and joined the melee.

A man expects to bury his parents. But expectation doesn’t keep grief from prowling the corridors of the mind, sniffing out the soft spots. Dad died years ago; the wound scarred over into an ache that only flares on Christmas mornings and random Thursdays. Now Mom was slipping toward him, and I would soon wear the title orphan. It sounds absurd in a grown-up mouth, but the word doesn’t age out. It simply waits in the wings for the second parent to fall, then walks onstage and bows.

The road unspooled ahead—two gray lanes stitched through sorghum stubble and pastures gone blond. I’d envisioned this “Hope & Generosity Tour” as a pilgrimage: three months of backroads, coffee counters, and front-porch confessions, hunting the ordinary saints who keep small-town America from blowing away. I had found them, too—Michaela with her kennel of rescues, Grandma Gloria reading alphabet cards to kindergartners, Tom and Peg shepherding a town of 130 through bake sales and Rock-A-Thons. Their stories filled my notebooks like spring runoff fills creek beds. But death has a way of rewriting itineraries.

I pulled off at a lonely turnout overlooking a Kansas wheat field newly turned to stubble—earth dark, furrows straight as moral plumb lines. Josie ticked and cooled. High above, a V of geese rowed south, their calls falling like questions I couldn’t answer.

I thought about the last real visit with Mom, a month earlier when Bren and I detoured to my boyhood home for my fiftieth high school reunion. She’d sat propped in her recliner, oxygen tubing looping over a jumble of blankets. But her eyes were sharp, the brown of fresh-broken pecan shells, and the mind behind them sharper still. We reminisced about the "good old days," stories flowing like familiar rivers carving through ancient canyons. There was comfort in those shared histories, a temporary suspension of the inevitable.

She was smaller that day—bones like driftwood, skin papery, but the voice still carried iron filings. That was her: make the angel of death wait on the porch while she finished the punchline.

Now the punch line hovered unfinished. I had miles to drive, profiles to gather, promises to keep. She ordered me to keep the engine humming. She wanted me to remember her as she was when we last visited, no wasting away until death took her.

She was smaller that day—bones like driftwood, skin papery, but the voice still carried iron filings. That was her: make the angel of death wait on the porch while she finished the punchline.

Night divided the plains into two shades of black: earth and sky. I sat on the van’s bumper, listening to corn leaves rattle like gossip in the wind. Grief slipped its leash and padded closer.

I tried to picture a world without her voice. Harder than you’d think. For sixty-plus years her commentary had narrated my life—sometimes as drill sergeant, sometimes as lawyer for the defense, and occasionally as comic relief. Even in silence I could hear her: “Stand up straight. Hold the door. Keep a spare twenty in your wallet for emergencies.” When that voice falls silent forever, what echo replaces it?

The stars answered by igniting, one by one, ancient fires burning billions of years just to flicker above a Kansas pull-off. I realized grief and starlight share a trait: each began long before I noticed, and each will outlast my noticing.

Morning came dressed in damp fog. I brewed coffee on the camp stove, watched steam swirl away, and dialed the number I both dreaded and needed. My sister answered on the second ring. Her voice sounded like crepe paper: fragile, purposeful.

“She’s still with us,” she whispered. “Sleeping mostly. Breathing’s shallow.”

I asked if she read Mom the blog posts I was writing—little vignettes from the road, stories of strangers’ kindness.

“Read every word,” Sis said. “She smiled at the dog-rescue one. I think she mouthed ‘good girl.’”

Silence puddled between us. I heard a monitor beep, an air-conditioner hum.

“Keep writing,” she said. “It helps.”

Helps who? I wondered but didn’t ask. Maybe it no longer mattered.

Miles later, in a café that smelled of bacon and floor polish, I opened the notebook and tried to write Mom into the margins of other people’s stories. Maybe the profiles I’d been gathering were portrait fragments of the woman who raised me. Maybe I’d been circling back to her all along.

The realization loosened something—the knot where sorrow and gratitude tangled. Tears came, surprising and clean, dribbling into black diner coffee. No one noticed; if they did, they left me that kindness. When the cup was empty, so was the knot. Not gone, but slackened enough for breath.

Days slid by measured in county signs. Missouri became Oklahoma, Oklahoma bled into Arkansas. One dawn outside West Helena, Arkansas, my phone lit before sunrise. I felt the vibration in my bones. My sister texted: “She’s gone.”

Two words. A door slammed—no, not slammed; shut with soft finality. I pulled Josie onto the gravel shoulder, killed the engine, waited for the emptiness to roar. It didn’t. Instead, a calm spread—wider than sorrow, older than me. The plains accepted one more grain of dust. Somewhere a nurse folded sheets, a chart was closed, morphine locked away. The warrior laid down her purse.

Grief doesn’t end; it changes address.

Grief doesn’t end; it changes address. Some days it camps on the porch, gentle and reminiscent. Others, it breaks in through the screen door and rummages the kitchen for old arguments, unanswered questions. But it travels lighter when mixed with purpose, and purpose is what she’d assigned me.

I stopped at a roadside stand outside Birmingham, bought a sack of peaches just because she adored them. Gave them to the next family I met—a single dad juggling night shifts and Little-League fees. Told him they were from my mother. Didn’t explain further; didn’t need to. He took them the way the hungry take bread: with astonishment that bread still exists.

Miles later I realized that simple act—passing sweetness forward—was the perfect memorial. No headstone required, just continued motion of kindness seeded, fruit shared, hope kept alive in small, ordinary gestures.

Night again. Camped beside a lake, crickets sawing the dark, I scribble this final note by lantern glow:

She taught me to fight for myself, to speak, to keep moving. She taught me to stand between younger kids and older bullies, between justice and indifference. Dying, she taught me one more lesson: that love sometimes looks like letting go, trusting the road to finish the story.

One day I’ll drive home, carve words into eulogy, hold Bren, and bury a warrior. Then I’ll climb back into Josie, point her toward the next unknown town shimmering on a two-lane ribbon, and keep the promise:

Find the goodness.
Tell the tale.
Swing the purse if you have to.

The sign above the doorway sputtered and blinked—SUNSHINE COIN LAUNDRY—flickering neon lights that buzzed like weary cicadas. Sunshine had nothing to do with the place and precious little to do with the morning outside.

I pushed through the aluminum‑framed glass door with a hip check—it stuck in the humidity—and felt the warm, lint-thick air wrap itself around me like a damp quilt. A bell gave a half‑hearted ding, then surrendered to the heavier music of whirring drums, rattling quarters, and the slow cough of fluorescent tubes straining against their age.

1

On the road you measure life in miles and engine noise, but every so often a man has to reckon with the smaller arithmetic of socks and T-shirts. My reckoning came on a raw Sunday somewhere between the Missouri River and memory, after three weeks of gravel lots, greasy diners, and restless sleep inside Josie’s Assuan‑brown shell. I could smell myself before I stepped from the driver’s seat; the clothes in my duffle had begun to stage a rebellion.

Inside, twenty‑odd washers sat like squat soldiers in two tired rows, enamel chipped, coin slots greasy from ghostly fingers. Above them a hand‑lettered sign read NO DYING CLOTHES IN MACHINES—the absent “e” a warning and a prophecy. Someone had underlined it three times in red marker, the color bleeding with each pass, as though the writer feared the message might fade the same way customers did, load after load, swirl after swirl, until only a faint outline of themselves remained.

A little heat still clung to the night, yet the ceiling vents expelled nothing but a sigh. Far back, near the vending machines that promised “SOAP • SOFTENER • HOPE” for $1.25 in quarters, two gray plastic chairs had surrendered to gravity. I chose the least cracked one and let my bag slump beside me.

2

Every laundromat has its cast of temporary exiles: the night‑shift nurse nodding over mystery paperbacks; the divorced father folding Spider‑Man pajamas with military precision; the wide-eyed graduate student who believes the plaque that says FREE WIFI will mean something. This morning’s troupe was smaller than most, but no less human.

• A rail‑thin man in a Royals cap stood guard by machine #7, eyes darting from tumbling jeans to the exit and back again, as though afraid the door might close forever if he looked away too long.
  
  
• A mother with two toddlers corralled her young like a weary border collie, the children orbiting the rolling baskets in sugar‑fueled delirium.
  
  
• And in the far corner, beneath a poster that once depicted a tropical beach but now looked as bleached and brittle as bad parchment, sat a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They had erected a card table of pamphlets—WATCHTOWER, AWAKE!, salvation spelled out in eight‑point type—but their thumbs worked phone screens with the zeal of parishioners at a digital altar. Candy Crush salvation.
  
  

Not one of them met another’s gaze for more than a heartbeat. It was as if we each occupied our own transparent cubicle, soundproofed by exhaustion and the hypnotic churn of soapy water.

Outside, the sky was the color of a brackish pond. Rain threatened. I thought of Josie parked outside, her gutters clogged with seed husks and Midwestern dust. She would enjoy the bath. I, however, remained unconvinced.

3

The ritual began:
Four dollars in quarters clattered into the stainless‑steel throat of washer #12. Shirts, socks, underwear—evidence of road and sweat—spiraled into the tub.
A scoop of cheap powder, blue as robin eggs, followed like sacrificial snow. I slammed the lid. A moment later the machine shuddered awake, water sputtering through tired valves. The sound reminded me of distant irrigation, of fields where sprinklers tick‑ticked across soy like metronomes for growing things.

A man becomes a philosopher when he can do nothing but wait. I propped a foot on my duffle, tried to read yesterday’s newspaper, failed, and instead watched the spin cycle of strangers. The Royals‑cap fellow finally relaxed his shoulders; perhaps machine #7 had stopped threatening to eat his quarters. The toddlers discovered that the squeaky cart wheels made excellent engines for an imaginary train, their mother too spent to scold them. The Witnesses laughed at something on a shared screen, the stack of tracts untouched.

4

I pulled a small notebook from my pocket—the same one that has collected county names, diner recipes, and the addresses of kind strangers who handed me peaches from porch swings. The pen hesitated before I wrote:

"Laundry teaches patience; patience teaches listening; listening teaches story."

A simple line, perhaps too earnest, but in the smell of bleach and warmed lint it felt profound.

Weeks earlier the road had been crisp with purpose: drive, interview, photograph, write—repeat. Lately, with coughs graveling in my chest and Josie coughing her own metallic phlegm, purpose had collapsed into survival. Yet here, amid humming motors and coin‑box dirges, I sensed a different kind of purpose fermenting: the necessity of being still long enough for clarity to find me.

5

The Royals fan approached, balancing an armload of damp denim. He nodded at my sneakers, the Kansas grit still clinging to the soles. “You been traveling,” he said—not a question. I offered the brief version: Carolinas to Ohio, then west and south, stories traded like seeds. His face softened. He said he drove long‑haul for fifteen years, saw every truck stop lounge from here to Laredo. “But you don’t really see,” he admitted. “Not when the freight’s late and dispatch is barking in your ear.” Now he repairs combines for a dealership. Less road, more grease under the nails. We spoke of harvest schedules and the price of diesel until his dryer dinged and he excused himself with a gentle “good luck out there.”

Connection—thin filament, quickly snapped, but connection all the same.

6

My own washer finished. I transferred the wet bundle to a dryer and fed it a buck seventy-five. The machine roared to life, hot breath fogging the glass door until my reflection blurred. In that ghost shape I recognized the wear this journey had carved: hollowed cheeks, eyes twelve shades beyond tired. A man cannot outrun mirrors forever.

And then, in the lull between dryer start‑up and realization, I felt it: hunger. Not the romantic hunger of spiritual longing, but the pedestrian gnaw that says coffee, eggs, toast—now. I wandered to the vending machine, bought a honey bun near its expiration date. The first bite was cloying, the second necessary, the third a reminder that pleasure and necessity often taste alike when your belly is empty.

7

Somewhere overhead the fluorescent bulb nearest my seat began to flutter. Light, dark, light, dark—the cadence of a heartbeat too anxious for its own good. No one else seemed to notice. Perhaps they had grown accustomed; perhaps they had accepted the flaw as a feature.

I wondered if the laundromat was Josie’s dry‑land cousin—another place where mechanical faithfulness fought daily against rust and fatigue. Maybe every human institution is just that: an aging washer, held together by faith, quarters, and the stubborn refusal to quit spinning.

8

Forty minutes later the dryer buzzed. Warm cotton filled the basket, steam ghosting upward. I folded with deliberation—the road teaches economy but also reverence for the small luxury of a fresh shirt. Each crease felt like preparation, like telling tomorrow I am ready for you, even if my engine coughs and my lungs protest.

The toddlers waved goodbye, the mother mouthed a tired thank you for… what? Perhaps for bearing witness to her small chaos without judgment. The Royals fan was gone, leaving a faint smell of dryer sheets and diesel memories. The Witnesses packed up silently, their day’s ministry accomplished entirely in digital epistles.

9

Outside, the rain had not materialized, but a pewter sky promised it still might. I loaded the duffle into Josie’s rear hatch, patted the dashboard. “Clean laundry, old girl. Let’s try not to add new stains too quickly.” She responded with a grudging starter click that smoothed into a mellow idle—like an old dog agreeing to another walk despite the aching hips.

Pulling from the lot I caught the neon sign in the side mirror. SUNSHI—E COIN LA—DRY, two letters finally surrendered to entropy. Maybe next time they would be replaced. Maybe not.

The highway yawned ahead, two faded yellow lines leading to stories yet uncollected. My clothes were clean, my soul perhaps a shade less so, but both were lighter than they had been at dawn. In the grand ledger of miles and moments, a laundromat Sunday would read as small print, but without such commas the sentence of travel becomes unreadable.

I downshifted, rolled the window, let prairie wind tangle the steam still rising from the vents. The road, like a patient teacher, whispered: Even the mundane is sacred when you bother to notice.

I promised to remember.