I consider myself a seasoned traveler, but this has been a test of my adaptive skills, this last week. I've been changing plans on the fly, pun intended, and customizing the world to fit my needs. Case in point, when I got notification after notification that my flight out of Oklahoma was delayed (four times), to the point where we touched our wheels down at the hub in Atlanta a full half hour after my connection was to have left, I made alternate arrangements. If the airline was going to throw a monkey wrench in my plans, I was going to use that tool to my advantage. I rebooked my connection for tomorrow instead, and rented a car. I showed up at my other parents' house, for a quickie visit. How many holidays did I miss while my own car wasn't highway safe? I wasn't coming this close and not taking this chance to see them in person. I didn't have to pick my dogs up until tomorrow anyway, so it really didn't alter much at all on the home end. I was rather proud of my rapid adaptation.
My mother and I took time to bond over our shared love of gardening before I left today. Her property is probably four times as large as mine, and it's like a garden within a garden. She has a large tamed area, with outbuildings like a studio and a potting shed, surrounded by a stockade fence, right next to the house, where they can have a neatly trimmed lawn and flowers in pots. All around that, she has the wilder area, the only part she actually calls her Park, where there are big trees and a few gardens where she has relinquished control to the little green spirits. As we toured the greater Park, that she has been tending many years longer than I've been at work in mine, she pointed out all the volunteers, including ash and oak that she is letting go, and a lot of poison ivy, which she would rather not encourage to stay. Where some gardeners grow dinner plate dahlias, she says she has dinner plate poison ivy. Her bullies kept us company on the tour of the larger park, as she left me jealous of her snake willows and dynamite crape myrtles (the only true red ones we've ever found). I guess my bald cypress is doing better than hers, which appears to be reviving from the ground up. She's got a lot of giant piles of tree limbs, left from storm damage. I wished I could have taken a truckload of it back for my cowboy friend to burn up at bonfire.
I got to meet a lot of animals for the first time this week. My mother had a new dog and a new cat who were quite interested in getting to know me, and for the first time in years my father has a cat again, one who was thrilled to learn she had a sister. While most canines seem to lose all good sense when unfamiliar people are around them, my mother's pappillon-sheltie mix was willing to listen and learn when I told her I didn't want her paws all over me. I had less success convincing the giant black youngling (who may well be the younger brother of my professional eater dog--and we think he is) that it really wasn't cool of him to shred my arms with his roughhousing. Good thing I'm not an arm and hand model.
For years, I have flown back to Oklahoma to the same hair stylist, when I wanted a guaranteed good cut and color. I haven't been able to do that since I moved to the Low Country, but I got to do the next best thing. My stylist owns a coffee house on the first floor of his building, so we stopped in for a snack and a chat. He was displaying the work of a wire artist, all around the shop. Great. Now I have a new medium I want to try my hand at. Is there any kind of art at all that doesn't sound like fun to try?
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