Exit 4

 

The ramp to Exit 4 is much wider now. It’s become one of those two-lane off ramps that rises slowly to an overpass. I also need to move over to the right lane much sooner then when I lived there. The whole approach to the exit begins about a half a mile earlier than it used to. Kind of ironic.

Yup, exit 4 off Route 3 North in Nashua, NH is now bigger.

Who gives a crap or notices this, right? Well, I do you see because Exit 4 is the road back to my childhood. I moved when I was 10 years old, but only about a mile, so Exit 4 was always the road home. First house and second house.

There’s not a lot of reasons to take Exit 4 these days. I do have one set of close friends that live about a mile off that exit, but we tend to meet elsewhere these days. Fun places like Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, and Portsmouth.

My parents are both dead, the last house was sold many years ago, and my only brother lives 20 miles further north in Manchester. You see, that’s why I’ve been passing Exit 4 a lot lately, cause I’m making a point of seeing him regularly and he doesn’t drive anymore.

Mom and Dad are also buried less than a mile from Exit 4. Coming from Massachusetts you go right at the top of the ramp to the cemetery. Left would take you to my childhood homes. The routine this past year has been to visit the grave, leave a penny or a golf ball or a tennis ball or some other memento and then go see my brother further north. I fly by the exit on the return trip south to Massachusetts. Started thinking today that my chat with Mom might make more sense after the visit than before. She would have laughed at that comment.

We all have an Exit 4. Several of them. It’s a highway ramp, not a home, or school, or neighborhood that evokes much stronger memories and emotions. And I have those too. But that stretch of asphalt and steel – that exit - always hits me hard. I exited my hometown down that ramp in ways big and small, and one day in a dramatic fashion that I will live with forever. I’ve stopped going left at the top of the ramp in search of answers. They aren’t there. I go right now and ask questions. And I give some answers too.