Pet Teenager

 I have a pet teenager.  I found her when she was sixteen and I made the mistake of feeding her, and you know how that goes.  Once you feed them they keep coming around.

She lives down the block from me, and it's one of those divorced dad got stuck with custody and doesn't know what the hell he's doing situations. And that's fine.  The man is trying.  Meanwhile he ended up with a small person with more determination and ambition in her pinkie toe than I have ever had in my life.  the kid took herself out of high school and finished her education online - by herself - she got a job here in town when jobs were hard to find - by herself - she got a bank account and a credit-limited card - by herself - and now, I'm teaching her how to drive.

The kid is amazing.

The first thing she did was drive us into a big hill of blackberry bushes, but she powered out of it and there we sat in the car, way, way, way back out in the country, and the whole side of the car was covered in mooshed blackberries.  That's it.  I thought for sure we were going to go down totally sideways in the ditch that those blackberries were covering and have to be towed out, because the ditches out here also channel creeks and one small river, so they're deep.  Luckily, that didn't happen.  We decided to never mention this thing.  We flip those blackberries off whenever we go by.

Now we've worked our way up to drifting around what is jokingly referred to as 'town'.  She's getting used to kids darting out into traffic, big trucks, strange intersections where the vision is poor, parked cars suddenly turning out into traffic, people on their cells not looking both ways; but all at a small-town pace.  Her dad went online and found a set of stickers that say "Please be patient:  Student Driver" that we put on the back and sides of the car, and for the most part, people have been kind.

The good thing about learning how to drive out here is that right now, harvest is in full swing.  The corn is really tall, so all corners are blind corners.  She's learning that around any given corner in the country there might be nothing but more road, or there might be a giant freaking harvester trundling along, looking like an alien death machine, taking up both lanes, and all you can do is be patient and stay well back.  There might be a crew of workers loading and transporting raspberry flats, which is an operation that looks like an open-air mining crew, with the ore carts all in a line going along like a little train with cars, only what's in those cars are huge towers of fruit flats that tip and sway even at low speed, with men ambling out into the middle of the road and forklifts suddenly appearing in the road.  Again, you give them all the room they need, you come to a full stop and you wait for them to do what they need to do, and then everyone smiles and waves as you drift past at an idle.

Today we're going to go all over our driving territory and try a few new roads - one up a tall, sudden hill that has a switchback, and one down an unimproved county lane, just gravel and oil.  A few more days of this, and then we'll practice those parking skills in the lot behind the Adventist Church.

It's nice to be a Grandma again.