Next exit closed

My drive to work involves the interstate that slices through the lower part of the country, and connects Florida to California, the beast known as Interstate 10. Much of my young life was spent in a house in a neighborhood off an exit from I-10. I currently live off an exit east of that one, and I work off an exit to the west. Which means that I drive to and from work along a road that oftentimes seems less a road, and more a hallway of unframed memories, and closed doors.

I pass the grocery stores my mother and father frequented, the gas stations, the high school I attended. I pass the hospital my mother was in two weeks ago, and I pass the Assisted Living Facility where my mother last lived, and where she died. I drive by the exits that are no longer mine to take. The exits that lead to the roads that lead to the home in which we no longer live. I glance at the sign and feel locked out. Not my exit anymore. I glance at the buildings and think they are no longer the buildings of my life, the stores of my life, of my neigborhood, my family. I glance at what was our neighborhood pharmacy, where I used to stop after work to fill my mother's prescriptions, in the same center as the grocery store where I used to buy her strawberries and blueberries.

I miss going into that grocery store and buying her those berries. I miss how happy she was when I'd bring her fruit.