No worries …

The thing I was most worried about didn’t happen. The property that I grew up on was not just a vacant lot. The garage that my daddy built was still standing. I found the storm shelter that my daddy made. My Mom’s chicken coop was still standing. The lot was hugely overgrown, so much so that I couldn’t go down the slope to where our playhouse used to be. I had to find a way around it. The trailer that was on the lot was not the one I grew up in. There is a question in my mind if the one I found at the back of that property was ours … it is horribly desintigrated, so I couldn’t really tell. Ironically, there was a chest of some sort sitting inside of the rotted trailer. It kind of looked like a treasure chest.

One of the biggest blessings came in the form of my previous next door neighbor. She came over and helped me with my “treasure hunt”. She makes dreamcatchers and gave me two of them, one for my mom and one for me. She remembered me. After 25 years, she still remembered us. In fact, had just been thinking about us last week, wondering what had happened to us. She also makes little buildings out of sugar cubes … quite a project and I would worry about ants.

I found the schools I attended as a child. I didn’t remember the schools, but I remembered the bridge that we had to go over to get to one of the schools. Funny how memory works. I tried to find the gravesite of this guy. I found the cemetery, but not his grave.

Then I did a surprise visit to one of my dad’s old friends. We now are planning to hook up for a short time Thursday morning to look at pictures.

I came back to the hotel for a short bit. I had a nasty headache, probably from being dehydrated, even though I was drinking water.

Oh, Bath and Body Works suck here. They didn’t have my illegal conditioner, they had just finished a “big sale” this past weekend. Don’t they understand? I need my illegal conditioner!!!

After the unfruitful visit to B&B I went over to the Oklahoma Bombing Memorial. That was amazing. Then I went to the Myriad Botanical Gardens. I think that was misnamed. It should have been called Mosquito Bus Stop Point. I got 4 bites in the 15 minutes I was there. Nasty things.

Then I drove by the hospital I was born at and then drove out to see the church where my brother and I attended Awanas. The home that my dad lived in at the end of his life was just a short ways from there, so I drove by there, too. Then I went to find where my aunt had used to live, but it was dark by that time and the home I think it was wasn’t marked with a street number.

I headed back to my hotel. And crashed.

My former neighbor, Mary…