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Good Lord, Texas is gorgeous in the spring.

I happen to love driving long distances. It's calming, it's peaceful, it's simple. Particularly when I can just listen to music and stare out the window, singing occasionally, tearing up here and there at particularly emotional songs. My parents, however, seem to despise driving. They get worn out, or something. My mom in particular. (Maybe this opinion will develop once I start paying for my own gas, especially if the trend in price inflation continues.)

Mom & Dad tried their hardest to dissuade me from going to the family reunion, even went ahead and told most everyone that I couldn't make it. Granted, I thought I couldn't. But then I thought about it. I had nothing to do from 9 p.m. Friday night until 7 p.m. Saturday night. Everyone I loved on my mom's side of the family was meeting in Llano, Texas, for the yearly family reunion, which is without a doubt one of my favorite "holidays." With 22 hours to kill and a tankfull of gas, I wasn't going to spend them in my dorm room. So I got very careful directions from Mapquest, reviewed the route on my big Texas map, woke up at 8 a.m. Saturday morning, and set out.

If you've never been to Texas, you wouldn't understand when I say the words "hill country in April." If you have, well... you know.

The place is barren in the winter, all reddish dirt and hills and plateaus, some scrubby gray-brown grass and bare, twisted mesquite trees.

Come spring, the grass and leaves return with a vengeance, in the kind of green that could rival the Congo. And every spare patch of field, including highway medians, is covered in bluebonnets and indian paintbrushes, with buttercups and black-eyed susans peeking through the cracks.

So I'm driving up 281, taking deep breaths and just grinning like an idiot because it stopped drizzling Thursday, and on Saturday, the sky was intensely beautiful. Like a baby blanket, with patches of tangled white fluffbunnies.

Bluebonnets are the state flower, you know, and they're not the prettiest thing in existence, but when they're in flocks (and they always are), you can be overcome by the sea of cerulean tipped in white. Especially if they're mingled with the vivid red-orange of the paintbrushes, and the pale pink buttercups and... Okay. I'm starting to sound like a postcard.

Well, I was driving through a postcard. I had my mix tape of Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood playing and it made me understand just why Texas is so egotistical.

She deserves to be, at least in April. She puts on her wildflower coat and lets the wind out, and hill country property rises in value by another grand or so.

Oh, and the reunion was great, too. I left early, beginning the round of goodbye-hugs around four and finally getting away at quarter to five to drive back for my closing night performance as a (sunburned) angel. I have a hug-happy family.

I pretend I'm all urban and cultured, but put me in a dried-up creekbed with my (equally mature) cousins, and we're tumbling through muddy grass with twigs tangled in our hair, talking about college and squealing at the sight of crickets. Such sophisticates, we.

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