Ask anyone “What does springtime mean to you?” and you’re liable to get a variety of answers.
It’s baseball season. It’s wedding season. It’s wabbit season!
While each of these responses are quite valid, it might as well officially be declared pothole season.
It is not a spectator sport. It is certainly no occasion to propose a toast. And if only we could hunt them down. Well, actually we pay our taxes so trained professionals can hunt down potholes and humanely remove them from society.
Ironically, speaking of hunting, part of the function of a state-sanctioned deer hunting season is to “thin the herd” which, in turn, keeps deer from spilling over onto our roadways too much, a very dangerous scenario indeed. But with potholes comes another string of traffic perils. The great chasms in the middle of the road are dangerous enough, but around here, pothole season is better known as the beginning of road construction season.
For a time, annually it seems, we have long stretches of road where we are confined to one lane where we’d grown accustomed to two or more. While we are navigating that narrow corridor, construction workers, vehicles and equipment, orange cones, and dust flying all around divide our attention and obstruct our view of the road.
Have you noticed that even though all along you’ve been expected to stick between the lines, when there are cones up and construction going on in the next lane, suddenly that one lane feels about 75% narrower than it did before?
But I digress.
It’s just a lot, and it calls upon us to be the most skillful motorists that we can be. This may just mean taking a moment before getting behind the wheel to mentally prepare ourselves to avoid anything that will further captivate our attention (food, drinks, !phone calls!) and to be sure that if we have children in the vehicle with us, that they are (a) well-secured in their seats, and (b) sufficiently occupied that they will not create any diversion for the driver while crossing the One Lane of Peril over to the Land of Re-Opened Spaces.
And seeing as road construction is inevitable and apparently an eternal work in progress, sure it’s nothing to celebrate, but a spoonful of acceptance can improve one’s attitude toward what is otherwise an annual festival of gridlock, logjam, and bottleneck, and let’s face it, probably a fair amount of honking and swearing at times. We don’t have to celebrate it, but once it’s done, there will be fewer potholes.
For a while anyway. It’s never done!
Okay, breathe…and remember, a well-aligned vehicle certainly is something to celebrate.