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Mother had another of her wild-hair-brained ideas ... and I fell for it.

She is in her 80's, has a nice sized trailer I bought her maybe 35 years ago.  It sits in a small trailer park in the middle of nowhere, a retirement community of sorts.  She has a small yard which her fusses over no end.  And I never realized that she was cutting her own grass because she was not going to have no Mexican cutting her grass or in her yard ... yeah, a Native American Indian bigot.  sigh.  So, she had bought herself a push mower and now she is too weak to do her tiny plot of grass.  And one of her friends, in a similar situation, only with 5 acres of grass! decided it was time for a riding mower and she gave mom her electric mower.  Only, all I knew was that one of her friends given her a mower and I needed to pick it up ....

So, I borrowed a car with a huge trunk, spent hours in prayer for a day of normalcy with mother, and blasted off at 4:30 AM.  She had already called me twice!  Once to be sure I was up and once to tell me she was getting the potatoes ready.  Mother!

Now, it is 45 miles to mother's trailer one way.  Then I found out that we were going to a place 100 miles, even further!  And I am thinking: 290 miles worth of driving, second longest drive since I lost my leg!  EEEEEEEPAH!  Yeah, I was hurting by the time it was over ...

We were able to make it down to her friends house by 10.  But only because I refused to drive the back roads, took freeways as much as possible and absolutely refused to get involved in her psychotic weirdness!  I tell you, by the time the day was over - I was ready to pop her head like a zit ...  Too bad I am a pacifist, sigh.

Of course, she had to take a her dog.  Remember this is a borrowed car and she is stuffing her dog, which stinks worse than any living animal I have ever smelled, other than a skunk!  And she is wanting to feed it while we drive down the road and give it water and play with it ... AAAAAAARGH!

And the mower was fine, I loaded it in the car.  Mom said her thanks and told me it was time to go.  Okay, I have driven for three hours and mom was to head off into the sunset with an insulting thank you to her friend.  So, I commented quietly that offering to buy her friend coffee at a local shop would be the least she could do.  Her friend was delighted.  Mom said, "Whom would have thought of something like that?  You are really weird in your brain Kris!"  She hopped in her friend's car and I followed along, only first stop was an antique shop.

And then another, and another, and another!  Eventually we did make it to a Subway where mom bought us lunch.  Her friend was very happy, mom was happy and I had found a record by the Canadian Blackwatch Pipe Band - so I was very happy!

I turned the nose of the car towards her home and I thought to myself that I was going to be home in two hours ... little did I know it would be four more hours of driving because she had this list of errands she HAD to do.  One of them, yeah, needed to be done that afternoon but the rest was merely to stretch and exercise my patience.  Sigh ......

It was now 5:00 PM and I am driving down the hill by the Seattle airport.  The sun is setting - thank you, you worthless Congressmen incapable of not passing stupid time change laws! - and I thought on how beautiful this area is.  And I REMEMBERED how I fell in love with this place when I visited it in 1968 during school break back in Germany.  I knew this was going to be my home one day and were it not for my family in Switzerland, this area would have completely held me - once I got out of school.  I exited the short freeway and turned on a road built as a memorial to the losses from WWI of this area.  The road is paved now, no longer gravel and crushed red brick.  Most of the old Dutch elms are now gone, most of the evergreens are now gone, apartments and condos cover where the cow and horse farms had been.  I turned at Sunnyside, the oldest settlement in the entire area, now buried by an airport runway and headed another two miles west.  Back to where there are no condos, few apartments, tall trees, a quiet lake and a house that is not a home.

I dragged myself back inside, turned on the news and watched the continued inability of people locally to understand that if you do not vote - your choice of candidate is not going to make it into office ..... thank God.

Time marches forward, everything changes, no one remembers the past and life is all about "them" and their desires - never a thought about others ..... nor about good.

And as I drifted off to sleep I thought on how Jesus came that we might have life and life more abundantly, which is not what our cultures brings nor can sustain.  My friends are mostly trapped in the hamster cage of chasing the eternal dollar, happiness is always just one pay raise away, one stock trade away, just one more home to rent away ... it is never ending and their happiness never secure.

How did this culture ever get knocked so far sideways ..... ?