Life & Place · A Decembers list
Every drive where getting there wasn't the point
You meant to take the interstate. Then somebody saw a sign for a lake, or a diner, or a town with a funny name, and forty minutes later you were parked somewhere you'd never have found on purpose.
This is the list for those drives. One line for the short ones, more when the map turns into a whole story.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down one gas station where you stopped for the bathroom and bought a bag of boiled peanuts, and the whole drive comes back — the song on the radio, who was asleep in the back, the argument about the map.
The atlas in the glovebox never recorded any of this. It marked the roads but not the wrong turn onto the county highway, not the water tower painted like a peach, not the moment somebody said pull over, I have to see this. A photo, if there even is one, shows a parking lot and a squint into the sun. What it leaves out is why you stopped, what it smelled like, and the argument that started it.
Nobody sits down to write the story of a drive that was supposed to be four hours. It felt too small at the time. But a list doesn't ask for a story — it asks for a line. Where you started, where you ended up instead, who was in the car. Put down enough of those lines and you have the map that no road map ever drew: the one made of detours and gas station snacks and the places you meant to skip.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What ends up on this list
The wrong turn that turned out right
The exit you took by mistake, the road that wasn't on the plan, the town you only saw because the highway was backed up. Some of these were better than anything you'd have found on schedule. Write down where you were headed and where you actually ended up.
The stop you still crave
The barbecue place off the two-lane, the fruit stand, the gas station that sold cold boiled peanuts or fried pies or a soda in a glass bottle. You can still taste it. Name it, name the exit if you remember it, and say who split it with you.
Who rode along
Whether it was your kids fighting in the back seat, a college friend with a cassette collection, or your father who insisted on the long way. The car was a small room you shared for hours. Half the memory is who was in it.
By the roads you took
- Route 66
- The old Mother Road through the Southwest, motor courts and neon and the stretches that got bypassed when the interstate came through.
- Pacific Coast Hwy
- Highway 1 along the California cliffs, every pullout worth stopping at and the fog that rolled in around Big Sur.
- Blue Ridge Pkwy
- The slow green ridgeline through Virginia and North Carolina, overlooks and roadside apple stands and no way to hurry it.
- Great River Road
- Following the Mississippi through river towns, bluffs, and ferry crossings that took as long as they took.
- US 1 in Florida
- The run down through the Keys, bridge after bridge over green water, key lime pie at the end of it.
- Back roads home
- The unnumbered county highways you took to avoid the interstate, past farms and grain silos and the occasional roadside curiosity.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every time the long way turned out to be the point
Start with the one you bring up at dinner — the wrong turn, the diner, the drive nobody wanted to end. One line is enough to get it down.