LESLIE'S JOURNAL

This was happening at the arch just as I was across town, sneaking in two more helpings of Drewe's vanilla custard, one with pecans and one with pistachios (not for myself, mind, I had them packed up to go so I could take one to Helen). So when I arrived unsuspecting at the scene of the crime, smug with my secret ice cream surprise in the back, it was devestating to find that our great luck with the people we've encountered on the road had temporarily lapsed. Helen was crushed, of course, to think that someone had stolen it right off her person and I was terribly worried, unbeknownst to her, about what to do with the ice cream. The fact that I had it in the back of the car only seemed to make things more tragic and I wondered if I should just quietly toss it in a bin without mentioning it to my bereft companion.

I was thinking about the day before when we had watched a bus load of old people happily eating their ice cream outside Drewe's and making jolly conversation with us as regarded our battery of cameras, 'What paper you girls with?'...'You two twins?' I snapped a digital picture of a lady in bubble gum pink polyester trousers buying herself a frozen treat and everything seemed to be just perfect in our little corner of the world, when suddenly I saw that the lady in pink had fallen to the ground, her ice cream melting sadly into the asphalt as others from the group rushed to help her. A few minutes later an ambulance arrived. The last I saw of her, she was sitting up on the stretcher, looking around and smiling a little, as though she found the whole thing more embarrassing than anything else. It reminded me of what life can be like when you're a child and things swing so suddenly from sheer joy to utter heartbreak, as oppossed the grayer shades inhabited by adults most of the time. As they lifted the stretcher into the ambulance, my greatest desire was to buy the woman a new ice cream to take with her on her trip to the hospital.

I didn't throw our ice cream away. I let it sit quietly in the back, packed carefully in brown paper and dry ice until we were out of St. Louis and had absorbed the blow. Then I reached back and grasped the little parcel and suddenly I knew it was going to make us feel better. We ate it as we drove into Illinois, already problem solving and remarking that of all the things that could have happened on such a long trip with so much equipment, it could have been worse.

Now we are parked on a beautiful little stretch of the old 1926 road in its original cement, little green plants and wild flower growing through the cracks. We are both writing in our leather bound journals, enjoying a low tech moment sitting in the grass under peach and dogwood blossoms.

As ever, when things go wrong it is the road itself that seems to console us and make us feel that we are still on an amazing journey.