Out where the suburbs end.

Recently I had to drive alone out of state, and on the way back I took the side roads instead of the highway. It was hot, but a beautiful day for driving. Everything was green. The crops were coming along fine in the farms I passed. Small town schools were closed, hibernating in the hot sun. Cows were just hanging around, doing their thing. Not too many other cars about. Once in a while I would come to a stop sign or traffic light, and we might have a total jam -- two cars in front of me. They would go their way, I mine, and happy travels to you.

I love it.

Sometimes when I'm tooling along, looking at the high-numbered houses on the low-numbered roads, I can almost touch that sense of longing that C.S. Lewis talked about, mostly in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and also in The Weight of Glory:

the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

In my case this longing could easily be mistaken for nostalgia, for there are elements of nostalgia present in these trips. You see houses that time has forgotten -- neat and in good repair, for if time had remembered them they would have been ravaged -- but no one has ever said, "This is so 1960s. Tear it down and put up something modern." You can see houses in rows that each reflect the different decade in which it was built, going back up to a hundred years, each one in fine shape. Some look like the houses of my childhood, some of styles that came later. So I do get a twinge for those houses of my youth, it's true.

But nostalgia alone can't strike me this way. There is no Golden Age for me, as I have never had a period of my life that was not full of fear or loss or disappointment, and I'm too honest to think there ever had been. I miss the eighties, but I was young then, and everyone misses youth -- but I thought for sure we were going to have World War III (all the smart people said so).

Nostalgia can be sweet, but is not enough to cause the feeling I describe. And for the record, I hated long country drives when I was a kid. BOOORRR....RING. So I'm not harking back to a fondness for those.

It's not a time, but timelessness, that opens me up to Lewisian feelings on these trips. As in the Lewis quote above, it's extraordinarily hard to convey this feeling to others, but you know it if you feel it. To Lewis, who had experienced it in childhood and then walked a long road through paganism and atheism, it came to mean that desire for a home we have never really known, the place we really belong that is no place in this lesser world. It was a scent from a feast of things better than you could ever eat, a scent that was itself better than anything you could consume on earth. For him it was a sign that we are not in our real homes in this world, but that we have hope we will get there someday.