Interesting trip

Mollie and I had a good trip – but it had a spooky element to it. We saw my cousins, Bea and Ann. Ann, the younger of the two is in a nursing home and didn’t really know me although she recognized the picture of my mother and called her by name. But she never really got my connection. Anyway, she was pleased to have visitors and we talked for a while.

Then she was off on a ‘fieldtrip’ where they took them out in the little bus to see all the flowers and blooming trees. She might not have known me, but she seemed happy. Bea was in a small apartment, mostly bedridden. Her daughter is living there and taking care of her.  She is still very sharp and she and Mollie enjoyed teacher talking.

 

When I was a kid we would come for a week each summer and stay at Ann’s house out in the country. She had three sons, Mom brought my sister and I and we each could bring a friend. Throw in the boy next door and we had eight teenagers riding horses, going canoeing, and taking the big boat out water skiing. We all had so much fun.

 

About ten years ago Ann’s sons decided she was too far out in the boonies by herself and they moved her to a wonderful house in town on the river that one of them owns. It’s a beautiful house and I wanted a picture so Mollie speaks into her phone and put in the address – 123 River Road. The map comes up and off we go. We haven’t gone too far when we both feel like we’re going in the wrong direction. I thought we were already close, but the map was taking us to the highway. I checked her phone and the address was correct so we figured, what the heck, we’d trust it. But after about ten minutes we knew it was wrong. We weren’t going toward the river.

 

We made the next turn and we were talking about turning around when suddenly the road seemed familiar. The phone map turned us into the parking lot of an abandoned grocery. And suddenly I knew where we were! I directed Mollie to a small dirt road going off behind the old grocery store and there, at the end of that lane was Ann’s old house. The one I’d visited so often as a child.

 

How in the hell had we gotten there? I didn’t know the address of that house. It wasn’t in my phone and certainly wasn’t in Mollie’s. We both looked at her phone again, the address it showed was nowhere close to the house address. A spooky chill hit us. We turned around and went back to the grocery store parking lot. And after staring at one another for a moment, Mollie once again spoke the address 123 River Road into her phone and it took us straight back to town and to the house Ann had moved to ten years ago.

 

This is one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me. I wanted to see the house again, but I honestly had no idea how to get to it. I hadn’t actually been back to that house in more than twenty years. We usually met Ann at a restaurant and she would come back to the hotel to visit.

 

If anyone can figure this out for  me, I’d be grateful.