Not quite a stick-in-the mud on the back roads

Once during the recent very warm weather, standing at a country crossroads trying to make up my mind which way I’d go, I found my boots stuck in the tar. I almost had to reach down to lift and unglue them.

I remember this happening often during the legendary summers of my childhood, and I can’t have weighed a quarter of what I weigh now. Also, we got tar between our toes running around Clonakilty in bare feet, and my mother had to use butter to remove it.

However, molten tar wasn’t the only memory. When the sun is so warm, the back roads seem to me suddenly old fashioned. The illusion is, of course, entirely in the eyes of the beholder, but the road surface seems dusty, as if it was unmade, and the farms seem half-hidden in an archaic density of trees.