The month of May is busier than Christmastime. We have managed to squeeze in a state track meet at Prescott and two weekends of baseball tournaments already. We celebrated teachers at two of our local schools during teacher appreciation week. Our busiest week of the year is the week all the college students move out of the dorms and Greek houses. We service many of their families with summer storage at our Fayetteville business.
This year we had our own Razorback to help move out of the university dorms. The move in process was easy and I hoped the move out process would be as well. Our oldest daughter had already made a couple of trips home to drop things off to get the process started. One night we had settled in to go to sleep and I saw headlights coming up our driveway. It was late and we were not expecting anyone. I was immediately alarmed. When I went to turn on the porch light, I recognized our daughter’s car. She decided this was a good time to bring some more things home. We proceeded to get out of bed and help her unload it. She has a different concept of time management than the rest of us. Oh my.
When the day of her last final exams arrived, we planned to meet in the afternoon to finish moving her out. I was on a call with a tenant and kept seeing our daughter’s phone number flash on the call waiting. I finally got wrapped up with my customer and called her back. She was sobbing. In the process of cutting zip ties off her bed’s headboard, she sliced open her index finger. Her friends met me downstairs in the parking lot so I could see. It was a wound that warranted some stitches.
I called my dear friend and bunko buddy Kathy, who is a retired school nurse. I was hoping to avoid the full emergency room experience at our local hospital. Urgent care probably wouldn’t sew it up and the hospital could be a long wait. We settled on going to the local Physician’s Hospital emergency room. The staff there were a dream. They were able to get her right in. In the time we arrived, filled out paperwork and waited for her finger to get numbed and stitched, it may have been 45 minutes. The doctor who treated her had also been a broadcast journalist before she went to medical school. After bravely taking her tetanus shot, she showed our daughter some old tv station videos of herself.
When we finished at the hospital, we got to work on moving out of the dorm room. It was not nearly as seamless as I had hoped but we got the job done and we left the room clean and with furniture arranged just as we found it.
This past weekend was Mother’s Day. We had kids going all different directions – racetrack in Macon, Ill., baseball tournament in Springdale, rodeo in Lincoln. On Sunday I was able to go to church with two of our children. By that evening we were able to be together as a family and have dinner. We cleaned up the backyard and enjoyed a nice bonfire and s’mores to end the day. We laughed at the stories our teenage children told us about all kinds of adventures they have had recently. I often describe our big family as a lot of chaos. Gosh it is fun. Enjoy the chaos, neighbor.
Jody Harris is a freelance communications specialist, gardener, ranch wife and mother of four. She and her family raise Angus beef cattle and other critters on their northwest Arkansas ranch. She is a graduate of Missouri State University. To contact Jody, go to ozarksfn.com and click on ‘Contact Us.’
