200 Words on Turning Left

Turns out I’m pretty superstious about other drivers. I’m constantly trying to cast magical spells on them.

I live in a town where a lot of day-by-day stuff has to happen on the other side of a river. I love the fact that we live near so much water. There’s that river, there’s an inland lake near our home, a bayou across town, and Lake Michigan is just a mile or so to the west. It’s great.

Traffic patterns are quirky, and every local area has its own particular set of circumstances which animate those quirks. In my case, the combination of avoiding heavy traffic routes in favor of quieter side streets, the timing of traffic lights in two municipalities, the topography of roads in my neighborhood, and the very particular-to-me place where we live leads to the quirk that it is generally really difficult to get from the next-to-last leg of my drive home from errands to the actual last leg.

So almost every time I come home from errands, I find I am muttering spells under my breath pressing oncoming drivers to leave a big enough gap for me to make a left turn.