Life derailed

The car was loaded. The route was mapped out and annotated. I was so excited to start the road trip I had been dreaming about and planning for years. And then my daughter (a couple months pregnant)and with a 20-month old, decided she was finally going to leave her abusive boyfriend. Flee, actually. While he was briefly out of the house she threw some important papers, a few diapers and a couple of blankets, and the baby's car seat into my already fully packed Honda Element. And then she scrambled into a tiny space in the back and we fled. We were fleeing for our lives at that point. He is a dangerous person with ties to drug dealing and guns. We did not know what would happen if he caught us trying to leave - and we were not taking the chance to find out.

Over the next couple of days she stayed at a domestic violence shelter while I completely unpacked and repacked the car for a very quick nonstop trip to central California. What was to have taken me four to six weeks to leisurely travel, camping, doing art, and blogging was completed in about 16 hours. We caught our breath briefly, visiting relatives and then headed north again. California was too close to Arizona for comfort.

Over the past four months we have worked at getting some normality back into life. My days are now filled with cooking, cleaning & babysitting. I have grieved the loss of what I had hoped would be my golden years. Now they are filled with the sunshine of my granddaughter's laughter. A second granddaughter will arrive in September. We are making another and hopefully final move to a new town where there will be more resources for my granddaughter who has some developmental delays due to her poor start in life. And more medical resources more my daughter and the new baby. It is hard to plan much. I can not quite imagine what it will be like with two little ones in a small house. We will have a big yard so hopefully some gardening will be possible. We had to leave everything behind, so there will be a lot of thrift store shopping and yard sale browsing. All those pins on Pinterest for Garden Ideas and refinishing old furniture might just come in handy now.

I am hoping to get back into my art in some way. Not sure how much time there will be for that, but I sure miss playing with my Gelli Art Plate and experimenting with monoprinting. I was full of so many ideas for my travels. Letting go is hard some times.