For the past few months, I haven’t been more than a few miles from home. I probably wouldn’t even have gone that far except that I needed to drive my car to keep it working. It’s actually been nice, staying close to home, though I probably wouldn’t have gone so long without a visit to a larger town with larger stores despite The Bob if it hadn’t been for my knee. I wasn’t sure I could drive the fifty-mile round trip, but I was sure I wouldn’t be able to walk across the expanse of the parking lot and then maneuver my way around the store and then stand in the check-out line.
I’ve done well staying on top of the things I need, but the list of items I couldn’t get locally has been growing. Even more than that, I’m getting a feel for the areas in the yard that will need some kind of bush or shrub, and I wanted to see if there was anything I could pick up locally before I threw money down the black hole of mail order plants.
So today, after the workers finished up a stint on the garage, I took off. It kind of surprised me — I would have thought this first excursion in a long time would have taken more planning, but then, it’s something I’d often done, so it’s not like I was stepping off into the unknown.
Still, it was fun, just taking off like that. I thought the drive would feel interminably long, but it was over almost before I settled into trip mode.
The shopping itself was disappointing in a way — although I know this is long past planting time, I expected to find something to interest me, but I didn’t know what any of the plants were and didn’t want to grab indiscriminately. The more prosaic part of the trip — picking up such things as allergy medicines and ointments and cleaning products, as well as some food — was easy, and the drive home was nice. Hot but nice.
As soon as I got in the house, though, we were deluged. Not just with huge sheets of rain, but hail. Mothball size hail. Big enough to sound like rocks being flung against the house, but not big enough to do damage. I am looking forward to being able to put my car in the garage. Hail damage can be severe around here, and some insurance companies won’t insure against hail damage, and the ones that do insure demand a huge deductible. But that’s a worry for another time.
Today, the hail passed quickly. My garage is a bit nearer to completion.
And I went on an adventure.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator
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