yfir öxlina

The car is more or less where you remember parking it. You open the trunk and put your paltry luggage inside. The engine comes unhesitatingly to life at the turn of the key, and before pulling out you flip on the wipers to sweep the increasingly heavy rain from the windshield. You switch on the stereo. The voice of Ella Fitzgerald fills the car. The CD preserves the scratchiness of the original vinyl recording.

The rain is heavier than you had thought. You turn the speed of the wipers up two notches. When you were younger you used to wonder at how the motion of the wipers back and forth across the driver's field of vision could possibly distract less than the splash of the rain against the glass. And yet they do.

You pull out onto the highway. Changing lanes, you look backwards over your shoulder. There are no wipers on the back glass, of course. It is difficult to see out. But the stream of air over the moving car pushes the water into lovely curves you have never seen before.