Lost

There is a running joke in my family about ‘shortcuts.’ Often you’ll hear my mother ask, “Should we take a shortcut?” The question is always sure to be met with groans, followed by laughter. “Noooooooooooo...don’t take a shortcut!,” my sister and I will always protest.
It wasn’t always this way.
We moved to Morganton, a very small blip of town, when I was 6 years old. It’s not so small a town that I could give you a stoplight count or anything, but it’s small. We had lived there maybe a year or so – enough time had passed that we should have all been able to recite every street name in the town; its tiny grid should have been burned into memory.
Sure enough, one evening as we were leaving a restaurant, my mother behind the wheel, my sister and I in the backseat, my mother asked, “Should we take a shortcut home?” There was optimism in her voice. She seemed excited about the small journey ahead.
My sister and I were too young to know any better, so we gave my mother a thumbs up. What should have been a 5-minute drive home slowly became a 40-minute frantic journey through a maze of streets in Morganton. I think back and will never quite understand how it happened that we got lost. But we learned from that experience to never go on a shortcut with my mother ever again. We had been introduced firsthand to her not-so-good sense of direction.
Now two decades later I’ve been informed that my mother’s sense of direction is even worse than I gave her credit for. She promises me that the following fact is true.
When we first moved to Morganton it took her 3 WEEKS to figure out which direction – left or right – to turn out of the driveway. THREE WEEKS!!!!
I am now even more grateful for the invention of the Garmin. I honestly believe it is the only thing getting my mother from point A to point B.
I love you marmie!