Back to Gravel

Sometime in late November or early December of 1987, I got a UPS truck stuck in Flannery O’Connor’s front yard.That sounds more literary than it was.At the time, I didn’t know jack about Flannery O’Connor. I knew the O’Connor name meant something in Baldwin County. There was an O’Connor Road somewhere else in the county, and Andalusia had a historic marker, so I understood I was on important ground. But important ground is still ground, and that night it had been raining for a couple of days.The yard was sodden. It was early dark, that winter kind of Georgia dark that feels like it has been waiting all afternoon to drop. I was twenty-two years old, driving one of the little UPS P400 delivery “cars”, circa 1962. A small brown box on wheels, built out of sheet metal, plywood and angle iron.I pulled down the drive, started turning around before making the delivery, and the whole vehicle sludged in.Not stuck at first. Sludged. The truck eased down into the soaked earth like the yard had…