It took me a couple of days to figure out what was waking me up each morning around 3:30 – the nearly-waxed, then the awesomely-full, not-quite-blue moon. Today’s just-slightly-waning moonshine did not disrupt my slumbers.

Truth be known, I woke up a bit disappointed at the wretched-but-necessary hour of 5am. The final REM cycle made possible by those extra 90 minutes only brought strange fitful attempts at a dream, which bore far too much resemblance to reality to be refreshing. Anxiety dreams about forgetting to complete essential quotidian tasks tend to manifest themselves just before I surface from sleep.

Summer clinic is halfway over, as of 6 hours ago. Besides waking me up at least two mornings each week well before my circadian rhythms move into their groove, this experience has been everything I could have hoped for. Patient exposure alone would do it for me, but in addition to the endless variety in that realm, the immersion in a workplace that harbors so many different philosophies of audiology is nourishing the development of my own, slowly but surely.

The commute was just as surely but much more quickly grinding down my resistance to the tendency to succumb to road rage. And then I tried another way home, which takes about half again as long but restores the life-loving non-wrathful parts of myself to their rightful places at the cornerstone of my being.

So I take a two-lane road west out of Milwaukee (giving it Wayne’s pronunciation in my head) and keep it below 60, sometimes slowing down to 45, 35, 25. And I’m glad to slow down, to get a good look at things, to not miss anything if I can possibly help it.

There are things that  change: wildflowers growing profuse and leggy, corn likewise reaching for the sky and tasseling out, soon to graduate I say to myself; calves growing bigger, moving slower; fairground signs posting fair events, then the rodeo, then the truck pull; the movies on the marquee at the drive-in turning over.

And others that stay the same.

Weathered split-rail fences the opposite number to bunting-festooned porch rails at the other end of rambling yards. Big red barns, stone barns, barns in time-lapse collapse.

Lakes with tiny lovely cottages along their banks, making me want to get a boat and live the rest of my life so simply, dividing my time between it + one of those cottages; brimming rivers and jewel-like vernal pools and a terrific bike path.

The lush green shady park that marks exactly halfway home. The taxidermy shop that precedes the encroachment of the capital city, one last gasp of rustication. Cemeteries and graveyards that I know are two different sorts of places because this drive got me wondering so I looked it up, church spires marking the distinction.

Sometimes, like today, there’s a deep-thought-triggering sight like a lone crane by the side of the road, staring fixedly at something in the narrow strip of wetlands beside the road shoulder. Say it three times fast.

I get home contemplative, yet have a hard time concentrating, so make something to eat that feels more like supper than dinner, which has not been my way of doing things, historically. Then I go to sleep.

This will not last much longer, this summer suspended between a rough and ragged spring just past and a fall ahead which I have thought through from ten different directions and am now thinking far past. Slowing down now could keep me from getting too far ahead of myself. Another reason to keep taking the highway instead of the interstate, to take my time and pay attention to the signs and above all, let my mind unwind.