There's a whole category of things our grandparents did without ever calling them anything. They were not self-care. They were not date night. They were not a wellness practice. They were just life. And somewhere along the way, in the rush toward more, bigger, louder, and more expensive, a lot of those things quietly disappeared.
Going for a ride is one of them.
My Love and I have been doing this the entire time we have been together, though I'm not sure either of us thought much about it until recently. It's not planned. There's no reservation, no babysitter required, no budget to speak of. One of us just turns to the other and says, wanna go for a ride? And we go. Sometimes it's fifteen minutes. Sometimes it's an hour. Sometimes it's tacked onto the end of an errand or a dinner out, just because the night is too pretty to go straight home. And sometimes it's none of those things. It's just a beautiful evening and that's reason enough.
We take Sally, my classic convertible, when the stars are out and the top is down and the whole sky opens up above us. We are in rural Texas, which means when the sun goes down the light doesn't compete with anything. You can actually see the stars. All of them. Just driving under that kind of sky with no particular destination is a kind of peace that's genuinely hard to describe to someone who hasn't felt it.
We take Steve, his truck, when it's a daytime ride or when we just want to roll the windows down and go. When My Love was looking for that truck, a bench seat in the front was a nonnegotiable. Not a nice to have. A requirement. It took longer to find the right truck because of it, but that bench seat means I can scooch over next to him and he can wrap his arm around me. It doesn't get any better than that. (Some requirements are not about the truck at all.)
Our favorite rides in the spring follow the wildflowers. Texas highways and back roads are covered in wildflowers certain times of year and there are some stretches we know by heart, and there are times when we'll drive out of our way just to see them. There's a back road toward Texas A&M with a big field and a red barn with A&M painted on the side that's just the picture of a Texas landscape and we will take the long way more than once a season just to drive past it. The goal is always the same: as few cars as possible, as much nature as possible.
A friend of mine lives at the top of a hill that overlooks a quiet green valley. She mentioned not long ago that she notices cars going by on evenings like that, just going for a ride, and that it's almost always the older couples. The Meemaws and PawPaws. She said it the way you say something when you realize it used to be common and now it isn't, and something about that observation stayed with me.
Because it shouldn't be something only the older generation does. It shouldn't be something we look back on with nostalgia while we're still young enough to just go do it. There's nothing stopping any of us from turning to the person we love on a regular Tuesday and saying, wanna go for a ride?
This is the same thread that runs through the borax and copper water and fresh air Field Notes. Things that worked. Things that got replaced not because they stopped working but because something louder came along. Things worth bringing back, not because they're trendy, but because they're good.
You don't need a convertible. You don't need a truck with a bench seat. You don't even need a pretty road. You just need to go.
From The Field: The best date night we've ever had cost nothing and went nowhere in particular. That's not a compromise. That's the whole point.