It no longer carries traffic, except a clickety golf cart to assist in feeding the horses. These days, it connects only two places on this planet: my house to my mom’s house. A two-minute walk. So close that she will visit in the mornings to drink sugary black coffee out of a mug I save for her, red like hibiscus blossoms. I’ll break open yesterday’s smoked roaches, roll them in a fresh paper, and we’ll share that too. It’s not much, but there is some magic to this distance, to the road that is only our road: Old Groundhog. I brought to her house one morning a foot-long wild turkey feather I found caught in a bramble on the way. Another day, it was a fistful of towel-wrapped morels, the color of glowing wax. We haven’t yet seen any groundhogs on Old Groundhog, but once we did meet in the middle by chance, in the tunnel of trees, when the spring was just melting green, both of us amazed and pointing up at a flock of starlings smearing their dark colors against the sky, and we knew we could do the same.
Jeff Dingler is an Atlanta-based writer. A graduate of Skidmore College with an MFA in creative writing from Hollins University, Dingler has written for New York Magazine, Washington Post, Salmagundi, Newsweek, and The Hollins Critic. He's currently at work on his first novel, Mother of Exiles, named runner-up in The Writers College's 2021 Global Novel Writing Competition.