But a Breath

I sat at the stop sign for 5 seconds or less. My foot pumped the brake as I approached  the corner, an automatic movement, as automatic as as the breath I drew in. As my foot came to rest solidly on the peddle, my eyes feasted on the landscape in front of me.  It was mesmerizing perhaps only because it didn't deserve to be.  The black country road stretched out before me, dipping in and out of sight with the rolling hills.  Tan grass grew on either side, dead and crispy mostly, but a tint of green showed through.  Asphalt and a bit of dead grass alone are rather less than attractive, but the sky and what poured from it made beauty of everything it touched.  Clear and blue was the expanse above. Light yellowed with the day's old age gushed from the west almost as if a liquid substance. Across the street, it bathed the orange brick of the old, little school house until it fairly glowed. It baptized the dinky church to the very tip of it's steeple, melting it's cool, white paint and grey shingles into friendly richness.  The two quaint buildings framed the rolling road before me. Parenthesizing these stood several naked and beautifully decrepit trees, also drowned in sunlight that illuminated every bump, knot and protrusion.  The sharply defined shadows of their trunks stretched along the gnarled ground.  Twisting and bending away from these thicker, dark shapes, wandered the shadows of the limbs and branches. They carved across the ground and the yellow light pooled in between them.
A movement to my right shook me.  Another car slowed to a stop at the intersection.  I suddenly became aware that my foot still rested on the break, that I held my breath in my lungs, and that the person in the other car probably thought I was an idiot. Reluctantly, I exhaled and raised my foot dropping it again on the gas peddle.  My hands automatically pulled the wheel to turn me towards home.   The breath was gone.