Our Lady of the....

I first saw her on the porch of a neighbor sunning herself.

I didn’t run into her again until that neighbor passed away, her estate settled and her condominium cleaned out. About that time, I opened the dumpster to trash my trash and there she was lying on the heap…with a broken neck.

I wrestled her out of the dumpster. Loaded her into my Jeep and headed for the only artistic urgent care facility I knew of. My artist brother and his artist spouse. There, she received the care and neck support she needed to cement the healing. Since I lived then in an apartment style condo, I had nowhere to put her so she happily settled in their back garden on the edge of some Bay City cornfields.

Our Lady of the Garden.

(We thought about Our Lady of the Cornfield but flashes of a Stephen King novel nixed that idea.)

By 2008 and the economic plummet, the family was relocating to Tennessee for employment and my brother asked if I wanted. I was by then in a new house style condo in East Lansing with a yard. So Our Lady came to call and stayed. She found a perfect place on the edge of a dense woods and took to feeding the critters in the winter and watering others in the summer.

Our Lady of the Woods

Semi-retirement and new adventures took me to a home on a lake toward the middle of the Michigan mitten. We uprooted her from the woods, said goodbye to all of the critters and headed north. There, she settled down by the lake and spurred rumors of a new and deeply religious family on the lake. Instead, she partied with the best of us and kept up her watering duties.

Besides major storms and high winds sweeping down the lake and threatening her stance, life got particularly eventful when she was kidnapped in 2015. At risk of being drowned by my ex led to this mysterious disappearance. It still tickles us that we got away with such capers.

Our Lady of the Lake

You'll find Our Lady of the Lake to the far right by the boat

Last year, this portion of our lives together came full circle as I returned to the original condominiums at which I had met her. Again, I found myself with no place to put her and spent some time trying to find friends with yards who might adopt her and take her on her next journey.

But life had changed a bit at the Parkview Manor in Flint, Michigan (yes, Flint). Many green thumbed neighbors had transformed a barren forgotten backyard into a glorious, lush, colorful oasis for meditation, reading, sunning, and visiting.

And that’s how Our Lady of the Garden found her way home…with me in tow.

It’s all an adventure.