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.
