We left Carlsbad early, still a thousand miles from LA but now close enough to feel the pull of home, like a horse nearing her barn at dusk. The coolant had reached the low line, so I stopped for some, but overfilled it. The guy on the phone at the…

Before we left the Texas Hill Country, I went on a breakfast errand, for butter and jam. I drove to the Stage Stop gas station and found some Fredericksburg craft preserves, but no butter. “You’d have to drive into town,” the clerk told me. “Walmart.” I didn’t want to go…

We left Austin mid-morning yesterday. Yam, the photographer-professor-passionate breadmaker (with nearly 20K Instagram followers), sent us off with a loaf of sourdough for our short trip through Texas Hill Country to Fredericksburg. Today was our shortest leg, barely 90 minutes so we could set up for classes and faculty meetings. …

We crossed the Mississippi in a hard rain. I squinted through the windshield, at first not realizing we were on the bridge over the mighty river, obscured by the sheets of gray water falling all around us. …

“We drove back to the city under heavy skies, on grey bands of concrete,” my mother wrote in one of her early poems, written in 1980. “I tried to read away the uneasy suspension between two lives.” Four decades later, suspended but pretty much at ease between our own lives…

Yesterday we — with Wyatt in the back! — launched ourselves back north, through Central Florida toward the Gulf Coast, Miami behind us. We’d spent a night in a high-rise where we had to cram into elevators, double-masked, with a dozen other people. …

One of the most aggravating aspects of a Covid road trip is just how many don’t give a damn. From Arizona to Florida, every day we’ve found plenty of maskless yahoos who refuse to don masks, even in restaurants or stores, filling their tanks or walking down the street. To…

“Stayin’ Alive” was blaring from the loudspeakers at a rest stop just inside the Florida state line. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Staying aliiiiiiayyyyyayvvvve…!” and the thunderous, plucky pop bass line to follow. …

Broken clouds and pale blue hung above us as we fueled up, got some gas station cookies to serve as breakfast (oh, yum) and pointed the Subaru east toward Louisiana. It had already grown humid by the time we arrived at my brother Yam’s in Austin, and even moreso in…