Jesus in the headlights

Hi all!  I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas or Hannukah or whatever it is you do for the holidays!  And I also hope everyone has fabulous New Year's plans as well!
Yeah, I know, the title of this post sounds like some country song about finding faith in yourself on the open road.  Well, there's none of that here.  The country song bit, not the other bit.  :)  I know I still have the final installment of the journey to finish, but I just wanted to do a little bloglette today.

This time of year, I do a lot of driving in the dark.  It's dark when I get up for work some mornings, it's dark when I come home in the evenings.  It's also really - REALLY - cold.  The mix of these two things makes for some interesting driving conditions.

This morning as I was heading into work, it was dark and cold as usual.  A fog had settled in the valley, sort of making it look all mysterious and magical and other-worldly.  There wasn't much traffic on the road at the hour I was driving in, and the oncoming car was few and far between.  Now, I don't know if any of you have driven in the fog, in the dark, in the cold, but I'll tell ya, when you're cruising along in a foggy sea of nothingness and then around the corner comes another car, their headlights look like you're driving straight to The Light at the End of the Tunnel.  Hence the post title.  For real though, the light catches on all the crystalline fog particles and creates a giant halo that mostly blocks out any semblance of a car shape, and just becomes this glowing orb with a bright white center coming at you rather quickly.  I find it both beautiful and slightly disconcerting, only because I can see nothing else until the car passes.  Like say, a deer.  Which leads me to my next driving observation.

I am a lucky girl.  I've not actually hit a live deer in my time that I've been driving.  Notice I said live.  I have, however, run over two - very recently - previously run over deer.  One caused a lot of damage and my car to need a new engine.  The other simply left some...er...jerky...on my undercarriage.  After these instances, I am sometimes acutely aware of things in the road.  That said, I will tell about what I saw this evening.  I was driving home from my friend's house on the highway, cruising along, doing my thing.  I saw some seemingly fresh skid marks on the road, so I slowed down a little, just in case there were animals or remnants thereof still about.  And then I passed a fairly large poof of smoke on the side of the road, which I thought was odd, because there was nothing around that would make such a large poof.  Whatever.  So I keep on down the road, and probably about two miles later, I started to see the very familiar dark lump appear near the side of my lane.  There's no other traffic, so I slow way down.  Sure enough, another poor Bambi had met its fate with a fender not too long ago.  This was not the unusual part folks.  I know it had happened really recently because there was a giant poof of smoke coming out of the poor deer.  (Poor deer...dear...ha...k.  sorry.  *ahem*)  It's so cold and the body was still warm, so it was actually creating steam, like when you can see your breath.  I can only assume this is what I passed not too long before, since it was a similar-looking cloud.  It was really eerie though.  I kinda thought it looked like the spirt was leaving the body and heading toward the sky....but then again, I'm just weird like that.  Creepy and yet serene, those deer.  So I made a silent nod to the animal as I skirted it, and headed on home.  Funny the things that make you think eh?