One of the first signs I saw read: Yield
Growing up surrounded by "grandmother" oak trees and gold-cluttered creek beds my family's favorite "free" entertainment quickly became car rides. While being sandwiched between my two older sisters in the back of our green Volvo, ceremoniously deemed "the green pickle," I would watch out at the whizzing green scenery (usually trying to refrain from feeling nauseous or asking my father for the fifth time if there was somewhere we could pull over so I could relieve myself, and his horrifying reply "Look's like there's a nice tree right over there!"). I remember one such road trip that we took as a family when I was probably around six years old. The entire drive up into the Mountains (granted we live in the mountains, but there are always bigger and bolder and colder mountains to drive to and stand in awe of) my sisters were obsessed with singing TLC's "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls." I hummed along making up my own song which to my untrained ear sounded identical to the one pouring out of my sister's yellow walk-man's earphones (the cassette being ripped out of the car's cassette player when asked to be replayed for the fifth time). After a day stomping around in the woods, sledding down a snow-covered hillside on a plastic picnic table cloth, and counting the rings of a fallen tree, we crammed back into the green pickle and headed downhill. My sisters both fell asleep but I occupied myself with the yellow walk-man and learned all of the words to "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls." The very first song that I learned all of the words to was telling me as a six year old to not chase my dreams, but rather to stick to what was comfortable, because then I would never get hurt.
After sixteen years of not chasing my waterfalls, I have a new song stuck in my head: my own. In my song I am not sticking to the rivers and the lakes that I am used to and I recently mowed over that Yield sign.
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