We decide to go out today, a clear, sunny day, a day with a minimum of pain for Stan. He agrees to go up the Hudson, if I drive, and I eagerly say yes, anxious to be out of the house, away from the four walls that threaten to enclose our lives all too often. The Little One and The Princess are at the beach and Mystery Man is hanging around with plans to do nothing more than watch movies.

Soon I am on a familiar parkway, the one I traveled daily to our first house, a thread of pavement that connected me to new home and old. It's the kind of driving I like best: light traffic, sunny day, and a road I know so well that my hands respond to the curves before my mind recognizes them. Soon I am zoning out, my mind traveling roads far ahead and far behind, detours that only my brain takes, and I am lost in the backroads of our lives together. I brake and accelerate and turn and stop, all with only half my conscious mind. The other half is relaxed and meditative and I could keep up this driving pace until we reach Canada if we wanted to.

In less than an hour, we are driving the twisting, rolling hills of the  money belt along the river, passing the high stone walls and lazy  fields and horse barns of Garrison. We pass Boscobel and make plans to return to see The Tempest, knowing we never will. We past the Butterfield Hospital and decide to call a realtor about the little brick house for sale on the corner of Main Street, knowing we never will. Later we end up under the trees, reading the newspapers and painting the mountains. Around us people read and study and knit. An older woman in a chic straw hat and oversized Jackie O sunglasses sits on her jacket and stares pensively at the flat river.  Speed boats and jet skis buzz by a red tugboat chugging determinedly behind the red barge that it's pushing upriver. A strong breeze kicks up and we scramble to gether the papers and journals as they fly across the grass.

Naps follow at home and the plans to grill lamb chops devolve into a rare treat of the entire family in the car and headed towards a burger joint. We sit at a sidewalk  table that our arms stick to and eat raw clams with cocktail  sauce and hamburgers  on greasy buns. Before we go home, we detour to the Italian end of town for lemon ices.  Our hands sticky with ices and in various stages of brain freeze, we are a  kernel of a family sealed inside the air conditioned car, a family  expanding beyond our reach faster than we would like, but for tonight we are shoulder to shoulder, squabbling over the radio station, burping in each other's faces, comparing ices from various purveyors round the country, and singing b-a-n-a-n-a-s, while watching the road ahead and seeing in our mind's eye, the road behind.