3WW XIX

Welcome to Three Word Wednesday.

Each week, I will post three (or more) random words. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write something using all of those words. It can be a few lines, a story, a poem, anything. This is a writing exercise. It doesn't have to be perfect. The idea is to let your mind wander and write what it will. I'll also attempt to write something using the same three words.

Be sure to leave a comment if you participate.

This week's words are:
Memory
Convertible
Dust

Colin eased his car off the pavement and onto the familiar red dirt road. Without warning, the smell of freshly fallen rain and honeysuckle combined to bring back a familiar feeling. No specific memory. Just a general, wistful feeling of home--a place he hadn't been in eighteen months.

It had been what people who lived on dirt roads considered a perfect rain. Just enough to stifle the dust, but not enough to make it muddy. It was the same kind of rain he used to hate when he drove a convertible.

Driving past cotton fields, corn fields, and pastures that he'd driven past thousdands of times before, Colin should have been comfortable. But he wasn't. He was nervous.

Rounding the last curve, the house came into view. Looking lonesome and so much older than he ever remembered. And it seemsed so tiny now. He recalled how it used to seem so much bigger.

Then he saw her.

She was almost running off the porch and into the yard to meet him. It immediately brought to mind the last time they had talked. The call had seemed more like a telegram, as he thought about it now. "Your father is getting worse. I don't know how much longer I can handle him without some help."

Colin knew his father had been slipping for sometime now. If he was honest, it was one of the reasons he hadn't come home this past Christmas. He was afraid. Afraid to see his Dad. Afraid of how he might find him.

But now, as he pulled into the gravel driveway and saw his mother thru the windshield, looking older than she should have, he felt selfish and ashamed. For not being there when she needed him. When they needed him.

He tried to smile as he got out of the car and approached her. Her arms were open.

"Welcome home, son. We've missed you." They embraced.

And this was home, Colin thought, as tears began to well in his eyes. No matter how far away he wandered. He put his arm around his mother and they walked up the porch steps.

"I took this walk you're walking now, boy, I've been in your shoes. No, you can't hold back the hands of time. It's just something you've got to do..."