I have driven that road more times than I can count, especially in the last week. Through West Georgia – Newnan, Franklin, Texas (the unincorporated Georgia version, not the state), across the state line (welcome to Sweet Home Alabama. Love, Meemaw Ivey) and into east Alabama through Rock Mills and into Roanoke. Past the same houses, hay fields, cow pastures, churches (so many churches), side roads, rusted out cars and ramshackle old barns that have become so familiar over the years that I hardly need to think about where I am.

And yet lately, I have been noticing all of it a little more – the undulations in the asphalt, the cracks and seams in the road, the way the trees move past the windows, the properties I have driven by dozens upon dozens of times. Some have changed. Some look almost exactly the same. All of them carry forward their own quiet rhythm.

Maybe I am noticing more because I have driven this route more times in the last week than I had in several months before. Or maybe it is because everything feels just a little different right now.

The road itself has not changed much – but maybe I have, or maybe I am…

Somewhere along the way today, with music on the radio and my tires rolling steadily over the sun-soaked August asphalt, I started thinking about poetry, though not the classic English-class kind of poetry necessarily.

I am an engineer, after all, which means I am naturally inclined to take something perfectly beautiful and emotional and rather quickly attempt to convert it into a math problem. It all goes back to math. We have already established that.

But poetry does not only live in books. There is poetry in music. There is poetry in a country song, and there is poetry in a rap verse – two very different forms of music, both among my favorites, but each built on rhythm, meter, phrasing, timing and the careful placement of words.

And once I started thinking about that, I began hearing rhythm everywhere.

In the road. In the music. In the engine.

My station wagon is a rocketship, but to be clear – it is not Space Shuttle fast, and it cannot pace a sunrise.

It can, however, make an obnoxious and somewhat offensive amount of noise while straining towards those velocities.

The four-liter twin-turbo V8 has its own rhythm as it pulls out of the curves along the back roads. The exhaust burbles and crackles on downshifts and genuinely sings under full-throttle upshifts, while the tires provide their own staccato bass line underneath it all as they pass over every seam and crack in the pavement.

There is a song in all of that if you listen closely enough. I often turn off the music to enjoy the sound of the car on the road all alone.

And today, I very much wanted to just put it in the wind. Hammer down. Get home.

But there are speed limits. There are curves. There are other people on the road. And I promised my gorgeous wife that I wouldn’t travel at extra-legal velocities.

So the rocketship wagon and I had to behave…mostly.

I spent the day in Roanoke today helping Stew work through more of Momma’s affairs, and I was trying to get back to Peachtree City for Handley’s second volleyball game. Her brothers could not be there, and she had been disappointed about that. I knew I was going to be late…but I’m always late.

There is a particular helplessness in knowing exactly where you want to be, knowing exactly why you want to be there, having plenty of horsepower available to get there more quickly – and still having to travel at the pace the road allows.

So I kept moving between those white lines as Alabama state route 22 became Georgia state route 34.

Somewhere during the drive back home, trying to get to the volleyball game to see at least a few minutes of it, I was keeping my eyes peeled for radar guns on the dash of a

Charger or an Explorer. And for a brief moment, I stared a little too long into the rear-view mirror. Normally I would just see the road stretching out behind me, but not today.

Today, the cargo area of my wagon was filled with two rather densely potted peace lilies.

One of those plants had been with Momma since Daddy died. It has sat on the front porch at her house in the summers, inside in the colder months, quietly growing through the years since his service. After Momma’s service this week, two new peace lilies had arrived.

Stew and I talked about it and decided it seemed fitting that we each take one connected to Daddy and one connected to Momma.

So there they were behind me – two beautiful plants filling nearly the entire view in my rear-view.

As the car moved across the cracks and undulations in the road, their leaves and blooms shook and bounced with every movement of the wagon. But the light was fading. It was early evening by then, and the sunlight coming through the rear glass was diffused by a layer of dust and dirt that has accumulated there because, apparently, washing the rear windshield (or the car as a whole) has not been a particular priority of mine in recent months.

The edges of the view were hazy. The leaves were mostly shadows. Every now and then a little green or white would catch the light.

For mile after mile, every time I looked behind me, those plants were almost all I could see.

Momma and Daddy filling the rear-view mirror.

Behind me was Roanoke. Behind me was Momma’s house, the work of settling her affairs, the strange process of touching things that belonged to someone you love and deciding where those things go now, memories, Daddy, Momma, two peace lilies swaying in the shadows to the rhythm of the curves across those little backwoods pigtrails.

Ahead of me was Peachtree City – Ashley, the boys, Handley, a volleyball court, our beautiful little girl who so badly wanted her family there to watch her play.

Life does not seem particularly interested in waiting until one chapter is fully closed before beginning the next one. The beat is different, the rhythm is not the same – but the poetry continues.

That idea had already been on my mind earlier in the morning before I called Linda, Momma’s closest friend, just to check on her. Because the grief Stew and Ashley and our kids feel is not ours alone.

Momma occupied a place in the rhythm of many other people’s lives – family, friends, people who talked with her regularly, people who followed her Ponderings with an appetite that I didn’t really appreciate until this week, people who laughed with her, people who expected to see her somewhere or hear her voice on the phone.

When someone dies, one life ends. But dozens of other lives that continue onward suddenly have to learn a different rhythm. There are places where a note used to be. There are pauses where there were once conversations. There are silences where something familiar used to live.

And maybe that is where music gives us another useful way to think about it. A rest is not the absence of music. A rest is part of the music. Sometimes the tempo changes. Sometimes the key changes. Sometimes you miss a beat. Sometimes the rhythm is disrupted so completely that for a while you have no idea where the song is going.

But the next note eventually arrives.

And perhaps that is what I have been feeling on these roads this week.

The same roads. The same turns. The same old cars on blocks. The same kudzu patches. The same road signs. The same white lines. But a different rhythm underneath it all.

I wanted to get through it faster. I wanted to put the hammer down and get home. I wanted to be there when Handley started playing.

But just as you cannot legally turn a back road into a racetrack simply because you have the horsepower, I suppose there are some things in life you cannot accelerate through either.

Some roads simply have to be traveled. And some grief simply has to be carried. So I stayed between the white lines and kept moving.

I did not make it to Handley’s game when I wanted to, but arrived halfway through her second match. I watched the rest of that match and all of her final one.

And as I stood in the lobby watching her through the glass in the door, waiting for a break in play so I could slip inside and make my way to the stands and my waiting bride, I found myself thinking that I did arrive late, but I arrived. Maybe showing up for the part that remains is sometimes enough.

Earlier that day I had been tending to what came before me. That evening I got to sit in the stands and watch what is still unfolding in front of me. And in between those two things was a long road home.

Maybe poetry is not always found in perfect rhyme or beautiful language. Maybe sometimes it is in the uneven lines, the change in cadence, the silence between notes, the rhythm of tires on pavement, two peace lilies swaying in the rear-view mirror, a volleyball game in a church gymnasium waiting somewhere ahead, or a middle-aged man trying very hard to get from one to the other without exceeding the posted speed limit by an unreasonable amount…

Maybe there is poetry in all of it – the familiar, the changed, the noisy, the quiet, the things behind us and the people waiting ahead.

Sometimes you just have to listen for it – the poetry between the white lines.