Close to Nowhere

• It was a dark and stormy night. The lady driving her car down the dark, country road turned into the wrong driveway again. This was perhaps the fourth or fifth wrong driveway. Looking for a friend’s house, she had become hopelessly lost.

This driveway was different though. The house she had glimpsed from the road appeared deserted and abandoned the closer she got. The front door was sagging and the windows appeared to be mad, blank eyes. The way most good horror movies begin...

There was no place to turn around. She had to keep driving toward the house and the huge oak tree that shadowed it in even darker gloom. The gravel driveway had turned into a rutted path and there was still no place big enough to turn the car around. The lady was terrified, but she knew better than to get out of her car – not like the teenagers in most horror movies that go knock on the door looking for help. There was no help in that house, only ancient horrors...

Oh, OK, it wasn’t stormy. (Snoopy always begins his stories that way though.) It was pitch black; there are no lights of any kind on really country roads – and Highway 310 is definitely a country road.

Keith and Beth Meals, friends from church, told me to stop at their house on the way home from Bible study. They had a sack of purple okra (heirloom) for me to take home and gorge myself on. I’ve been to their house many times and pass it every time I go and come home from church.

Apparently though, I wasn’t going to find it that night. That last wrong driveway after the first four or five was one too many. It was really spooky and scary. I called the Meals when I finally got home (and thanked God very sincerely) and they said they would bring it the next day.

I was pathetically grateful. The okra was a beautiful purple and it was really delicious. I ate the entire batch for supper the next night and enjoyed every little, crispy bite.

• We have several new family members around our houses. Daughter Dana now is the proud human of a young, red heeler female puppy, whose markings are just about opposite of her grown blue heeler. I’m voting for puppies; she says no, emphatically.

And I am the prouder human of an eight-week-old tabby kitten. We’re pretty sure he’s a boy (not positive yet though) and he’s a typical kitten. He races through the house who knows why and will attack toys, bits of paper, shoes, feet, etc. And since I feed him, he has adopted me as his human. He’s gotten so comfortable at our house that if he crawls up my chair and climbs onto me, he instantly falls slap asleep. I apparently am a sleeping pill for cats.

It’s gotten kind of funny. Teddy, my King Charles cavalier spaniel is horribly jealous. He’s too fat to jump up onto my lap, so he lays down across my feet and refuses to move.

So there I am, stuck in my chair with a kitten asleep on my shoulder and a dog asleep (or at least pretending) on my feet.

Which usually means I have to take a nap myself!