April Showers, May Flowers, June Craziness - Part 2

I—who pride myself in hardly ever getting sick—had been fighting a cold since last Thursday night pulling out my arsenal of natural remedies and being only moderately successful. Tuesday night about 3 a.m., I headed into the kitchen to get a drink of water and was surprised to see an orange glow in the window. My first thought was that the condos up the hill must be on fire, then I thought, “no, it’s my car!” Then “no, it’s John’s car!” All sorts of things ran through my mind, mainly “how can a car just catch on fire??? Did someone set it on fire???” The hood looked like a huge sparkler on the 4th of July. I gathered my thoughts then yelled to John who, of course, suddenly awoke from a deep sleep, “Can you come in here? Your car is on fire…” The front tire exploded which made me realize the gas tank could do the same thing and I threw all caution to the wind—sleeping neighbors or not—in yelling at John to “back up—that think could totally blow up!!!” We are just around the corner from the fire department who showed up in no time and put an end to the adrenaline rush. It’s the first time we’ve been thankful there is too much stuff in the garage to get the car in. It’s still slumped over on the street, waiting for its final rites, and shocks us every time we exit the house. No explanation, but since then we’ve heard that if you have a Ford Escape, you’d better sleep with one eye open. And park it on the street, whether your garage is full or not.

Thursday was fun. Hayden gave our staff a Bible storytelling demonstration in his creative way, then we all packed up and went to check out a potential place to move our office. Another one of those glorious days, none of us wanted to go back inside so we found ourselves back on the square for a while waiting for the maintenance crew to come unlock the door and we people-watched down on the square, watching a film crew and several visitors who were obviously in town for the Walmart stockholders’ annual meeting. Happily unable to do work on my still-disengaged computer, I went shopping for the grandkids and home to heat up the ginger-noodle soup. That night, it just seemed right to use the movie gift card that our dear friends the Flynn’s had given us for Christmas to go see Up, the cute 3-D Disney movie-- amazingly entertaining and we highly recommend it.

Another thing we recommend is making sure you know where the airport is when you’re flying out of a new one. It had thrilled our frugal souls to find $67 tickets to Atlanta. All we had to do was drive to Branson, of all places. The purpose of this trip was to pick up Lyle’s old faithful Maxima for Hayden to drive for the next two months. Hayden looked up the directions online and sent them to my e-mail. When I printed them off, it just didn’t look right. So…I spent quite some time online myself, filling in the gaps with missing information and reasoning why that couldn’t be the right airport. But look over here—there’s a brand new Springfield-Branson National airport in Springfield. That MUST be it! So after sharing with John’s Friday morning Band of Brothers group, we rushed off thinking we would have the full two hours early before their flight departed. Still repositioning things in the car for the ride home, here come John and Hayden rushing back out to announce that the Air Tran flight really does leave from Branson, 40 plus miles south of there. So now, the light hearted chatter on the way over turns to deep quiet thoughts of “how could I be so stupid?” and “we’re going to have to eat these tickets and we still won’t have the car” and “is it better to take a chance of getting a ticket or drive the speed limit and watch them close the gate before our very eyes?” Also, no one pointed out that you can’t make very good time on five miles of twisty mountain roads leading you through a mountainous golf community to get there. God’s grace is sufficient—and there is no other explanation—they made it.

I am a little sad about them being in Atlanta and Greenville without me. I AM the grandmother of three children in that part of the world! But, I have to admit, a three and a half day blank spot on the calendar sounds like a bit of a vacation. Maybe it’s the perfect ending to a memorable week. As the Up movie suggested, I may just go have another adventure!