Driving to Amelia

Jimmy and Andy and I drove to Amelia Island yesterday afternoon, to spend a few days at the beach. The trip only takes a couple of hours, with much of it spent on deserted back roads in south Georgia. Springtime in Valdosta still comes as a surprise: you forget from one year to the next how brightly the azaleas can paint the town, so it takes a while for the soft, subdued hues along the highway to have an effect.

Long miles and minutes passed without our seeing any other cars or houses or signs: only the empty road ahead of us, and lots and lots of trees. As we traveled along, a thousand variations of green began to emerge, and I tried mixing their colors in my mind; whereas the showy azaleas only require a simple palette, the complicated subtleties of the budding foliage could never come straight from a tube. Exquisite care and finesse were needed to get just the right shades, and when we rounded a bend, a sudden dusting of purple and yellow wildflowers sang out to be noticed.