Songlark Boulevard

I was on the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston one day last week when I began to feel that familiar calm settle in, the kind that comes whenever I'm about to step into a slower pace of life in a place I've loved from another time. I've visited the Kitsap Peninsula many times, explored it a bit, but have never really given myself permission to stay long enough to let it settle into me. This time, I did.

So when I typed Songlark Blvd into my Waze app, I thought, cool, a boulevard. According to Merriam-Webster, a boulevard is"a broad, often landscaped thoroughfare."I was picturing something handsome. Tree-lined, maybe. Well-placed planters. A general sense of civic pride.

What Waze delivered was a dirt road. A dirt road! What kind of boulevard is a dirt road.

This was a narrow winding lane through a thicket of trees, leading to my destination, a cozy home in a clearing, surrounded by a garden just beginning to come back to life after a long, gray winter. In another life, I would have had strong opinions about dirt roads. This time, I decided to be open and let things unfold.

I stayed.

Since then, I've been exploring the back roads around Kingston and Hannsville, and whoever named them was either a poet or someone who was having a very good day. Possibly both.

The name is not the road. And we forget that constantly.

We do it with the harder chapters too. We hear a word, like “divorce, alone, starting over”, and the picture assembles before we've even turned onto the road. We drive toward the label instead of toward the actual place, and we arrive with our expectations so fully formed that we almost miss what's actually in front of us.

But here's what I keep coming back to. A lot of those names weren't ours to begin with. Some were handed to us the way roads get named, by someone who saw something once and decided that's what it was. A former partner. A parent. A culture with fairly firm opinions about what a woman's life is supposed to look like at a certain age. We inherited those names without choosing them, and without stopping to ask whether they actually describe the road we're on.

It's worth asking, at least once, who named the road you think you're on.

A songlark is a bird. Small, unremarkable to look at, and known almost entirely for its song. Whoever named that road didn't name it for something grand or easy to photograph. They named it for something they heard, a sound worth preserving long after the moment was gone.

The road at the end of that name was a dirt lane in the woods with a clearing and a garden coming quietly back to itself. Nothing like a boulevard.

I'm curious about something, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's one name or label you've been navigating by that you didn't actually choose for yourself?

Hit reply and tell me. I have a feeling I'm not the only one who turned down an unlikely boulevard this week.

Every one of these roads was named for something real, something someone saw or heard or felt once, long enough ago that nobody quite remembers the story. A sound in the grass. A particular slant of light. Something that made a person stop and say, that's what this is. The name went on a sign, the sign stayed, and the road just kept on being exactly what it was.