Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I owe an apology to everyone who was so kind and expressed good wishes for my journey home to Nashville. I got home safe and sound on Monday night, having made the journey in about 9 hours (which is about average for the journey, given the normal traffic delays in Chicago). Chicago was actually a breeze, this time (apart from the torrential rains and road construction around the Skyway on-ramp), but I took it very slow and easy during the first part of the journey, when freezing rain was turning I-94 to one big hazard.

When last I posted on Monday morning, I'd left Dad with his physical therapist and run back to my parents' house to pack all my stuff into the car my folks were loaning me for the drive back to Nashville. I wasn't exactly going at warp speed (after all, I took time to update my LJ), since my last viewing of the Weather Channel early that morning hadn't been particularly alarming.

However, Brother came home about 11:20 AM, after picking up our parents from their various physical therapy appointments, and promptly lit a fire under me with his own sense of urgency. Very soon, he was telling me that it was time to just throw stuff in the car, any old way I could, and hit the road, because every second was bringing the freezing rain closer. Once again, his weather instinct -- perhaps honed by years of being on call 24-7 for snow removal each winter -- proved extraordinarily accurate. He'd just gotten the call to meet his crew and start working before we threw the last of my clothes in the trunk of the car, and I could hear the freezing rain starting to hit the pavement of the driveway (sounds like falling sand, rather than the wet sound of normal rain).

Brother's final advice was very helpful and appropriate: "The emergency ends once you get behind the wheel. Then, you go just as slowly as you need to, but keep moving, and try to stick as close to the lakeshore [Lake Michigan] as you can. Once you see the outside temperature climb above freezing, then you can just drive, but until then, you have all the time in the world."

He was also of the emphatic opinion that I didn't have a minute to spare for anything non-essential, and that an extra 15 minutes spent stopping off at my sister's house (as she'd suggested) to pick up the birthday presents she'd wrapped for me was definitely out of the question. And by the time I got out on the freeway, I was scared enough of the increasingly slippery driving conditions to agree with him. Sister will just have to mail the birthday presents to me.

Brother had said that as soon as I hit the Illinois border I'd be ahead of the freezing rain and could relax, but his forecast was off a bit. The temperature hovered right around freezing and the road stayed dangerously slick until I was well into the "recently-doubled-toll" portions of I-94 in Illinois. I couldn't even think about relaxing until I was practically in Chicago (where the outside temperature on my car's thermostat read 38 degrees), and even then I couldn't relax because, after all, I was still driving through Chicago in torrential rain with limited visibility!

And so it continued, even as the temperature climbed into the 40's and then to 60 degrees as I drove south through Indiana. My shoulders were still very sore from the stress of that accident on my drive north, even before I started my return drive, and by the time I neared Lafayette, IN, I was sorely tempted to stop for the night, already, and do the rest of the journey the next day. But the local radio news was warning everyone that the temperature was expected to drop sharply, while the rain continued, and that driving would be a nightmare, if it could be done at all, for the next couple of days. Even the 60 degree readings in Indianapolis weren't enough reason to slow down or stop, since there, too, the weather forecast was for a sharp drop below freezing and for all of Indiana to become a giant ice skating rink over the next few days.

The rain finally let up just before I hit Louisville (meaning that the driving conditions on the way south were just about exactly opposite to what my brother and I had encountered on our drive north on Christmas Eve, when the worst part had been between Louisville and Indianapolis, and by the time we got to Wisconsin there wasn't a trace of snow to be seen anywhere). From Louisville on, the only problem was the strain and pain in my shoulders, which had only gotten worse.

Still, I made it through, with nothing worse than mental wear and tear and muscle strain, and for that I'm very grateful.

And I honestly intended to go online right away on Tuesday and let everyone know I was fine, but I guess I was suffering some sort of delayed shock or stress, because I've barely moved for the past two days.

Apologies, a thousand times over, to missmurchison and anyone else who may have been worried by my "loss of signal" since Monday. And thanks for your good wishes and prayers.

Now, I'm just waiting to find out how things go with my Mom, since her physical therapist told her on Monday that the 'pulled muscle' diagnosed by the doctor at the hospital after her fall there before Christmas was acting much more like a compression fracture that the X-rays had missed.