Friday, March 14, 2014

Growing Things

Inspirational song: Locked Out of Heaven (Bruno Mars)

The party in Vegas is over for my Buffaloes. They were really in it for the first half, playing well. Then Arizona turned on the afterburners, and the kids started playing emotionally, which never ends well. They got frustrated, and things got ugly. Oh, well. If my team has to lose, losing to a number one seed, both for the conference tourney and the NCAA, in a semifinal round is probably the least painful way to do it. My daughter and I both wonder the same thing now: will we be invited to the Big Dance? I still have hope. 

I opened up the floor for suggestions for a topic tonight, and my mother suggested I write about a girls weekend trip my daughters and I took right after the little one graduated high school. The problem is, I took so many drives from New Mexico to Oklahoma to visit while we were there, at first I had trouble separating out which trip that was. I know there are a ton of pictures from that trip somewhere, but only a few are in easily accessible places. But the ones I have are burned into my memory. In them, I had on a bright yellow top, and my hair was blonder than any time since I was a toddler, and I was in the best shape of the last fifteen to twenty years. I think that's what I currently aspire to. I am definitely healthier from the inside out than I've been in a while. It would be nice to be that thin again (doesn't everyone think that seeing old pictures?) Maybe I'll go blonde again while the weather is warm, to recreate a little of that vibe.

That weekend was a lot of fun--a road trip with the girls, to spend time with my parents. I can't remember whether it was specifically for one birthday or for a combination of the three warm weather babies. It was while I was working at a little mom and pop plant nursery, so I couldn't wait to show off my new and improved gardening skills to my mother. She remembers well how quickly and often I exploded in hives on contact with anything green before my allergies were controlled. Being able to give her growing things as gifts was a new and exciting change for me. We took a trip to her favorite locally owned nursery, an expansive wonderland of bedding plants and trees. I grabbed everything I could think of that could survive the Oklahoma sun, and put together four or five big containers for her back deck. I wanted to stick around long enough to see how they fared, but that wasn't possible. Few of my trips ever got to last long, especially when all of us girls were taking time off of work. 

I asked my girls whether they had any standout memories from that weekend, and the older one certainly did. She recalled a car we kept passing and getting passed by, as we flew down the turnpike at breakneck speeds. It was a ratty, older sedan, and I swear I remember it missing the back window. Maybe it just seemed like it, because we could see into that car a little too well. And what we saw was disturbing. The female passenger's legs were thrown over the seat back, like she was upside down, and let's just say that neither of the two occupants of that car were as focused on the highway as they should have been. At some point during the drive, we girls got over any embarrassment over our inadvertent voyeurism, and were mostly just impressed that they never had a wreck. 


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