Return home met detours

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. My mom met all the goals they had set up for her at the rehabilitation unit of our local hospital. She was released on Thursday. I was expecting an easy trip home, as I planned to bypass the closed road in Fountain City. Obviously, the transportation department had other plans.
I had meant to go my usual route. I turned left onto 36 just outside of Lynn. It was a beautiful day and traffic was light. Once we got into Ohio, I discovered a cluster of orange signs warning of no edge lines, fresh tar and loose gravel. The car we have magnifies road sounds so it was a noisy ride through Palestine and beyond.
When we turned south on 127 I breathed a sigh of relief at finally being able to hear myself think. Less than five miles down the road was a barricade. Another road closed sign blocked my intended path. I thought of the phrase, “you can’t get there from here.”
Luckily, the detour directed me to a familiar road, 503. I thought I knew where I was until we got to the cemetery where my step-father is buried. Um, didn’t there used to be a two-story Victorian across the street? It had been replaced by a squatty lump of a house at some point.
We wound through Ithaca and the landscape became more familiar. I pulled onto a cross street and Mom asked why we were stopping. I said, “Don’t you recognize this place? This is where you used to live.”
She said, “I did not!” She looked around. “Did I?”
I pointed out the neighbor’s house and where her own little house had stood before it burned down several years after she had moved out. Truthfully, if it hadn’t been for the street signs, I wouldn’t have recognized it either. Everything had changed in the decades since we had driven that route. The ugliest house I have ever seen sat where the swing set used to be. A pile of gravel huddled beside the driveway. An outbuilding designed by someone with no sense of style lurked towards the back of the lot. It was a very unwelcoming place.
We continued on over hills and around curves until we finally made it to her house. She was relieved to be home. From all the chirping, her birds were also glad she was home. The parakeet tumbled off its perch in excitement.
I got her settled before treating her to the fried chicken she had been requesting for the past several days. My sister-in-law rewrapped the bandages on her leg as she is still healing from her fall when she had the latest heart attack.
The next morning she remarked how good it had felt to sleep in her own bed. She was also happy that she could fix what she wanted for breakfast the way she wanted it fixed. I made sure she was as OK as she could be before I left to take my husband to physical therapy for his replacement knee.
It was nice having her in the local hospital for rehab. I could visit without worrying about detours. I could spend a couple hours with her then go home instead of a simple visit taking all day. Nevertheless, I hope it is a long time before she comes back here.
I know there will be more health problems, more complications, more hospitalizations in the future. Still, it is a relief to both of us to have her home again even if we did take a different path than we had planned. Life is like that, things may not go as planned but the end result is as it should be.