By the time we arrived at our house, the plants’ leaves curled and drooped. It needed a drink and shade fast. After already undergoing that much stress, the plant would suffer were we to transplant it in the sunny location we had planned.

Let’s heel it in, we decided, tuck it in the ground on the north side of the house, out of summer’s wind and heat.

In the fall or early next spring when it’s strong enough to make the transition – we’ll transplant it to a permanent spot.

When it comes to heeling in, people, sometimes, are like plants. Transitions in our lives can come in big steps making a major move or change when the conditions are right or taking a baby steps, easing into a new situation thoughtfully, gradually, sometimes hesitantly, and staying there until ready for the next step if there is one.

Five years ago this week, after having lived in a small town in central Kansas for 19 years, I moved back to Tonganoxie.

A year before, in July 1996, my second husband, Dru John, had died. For the rest of the summer and until it was too cold in the fall, each evening his parents and I would visit his grave.

We would often stay at the cemetery until after dark, talking, reminiscing, star gazing, healing as best we could.

Sometimes I visited the cemetery alone one evening the following April a local police officer who was a friend, stopped while making his rounds at the cemetery. He walked over to me and said, “You’ve got to get out of this town it’s killing you.”

He was right and I knew it I desperately needed a change in my life. I called my sister, Loralee, who worked in admissions at KU. She set up interviews for graduate school. Two weeks later I was accepted.

It made sense to come back I could further my education and live in my hometown near my parents and other relatives.

Not only would I be back with my family, but I would return to the rolling hills and trees of Leavenworth County the vastly different landscape I had longed for while living on the windswept plains of central Kansas.

But even while in the process of moving two pickup truck loads of belongings into a small Tonganoxie rental house, I thought it likely that after earning my degree I would return to central Kansas where at that time I still had a furnished house.

After all, there were and are still people there that I love.

The funny thing was after a very short time I began to realize that finally, after all those years, I had arrived back where I belonged. Six months later I bought a house in Tonganoxie and put my central Kansas home up for sale.

Two years after that I married one of the most wonderful men I’ve ever met a man who, of course, lives close to my favorite town in the world Tonganoxie.

A month has passed since we heeled in the mock orange by the side of the garage.

Five years have passed since I inadvertently heeled myself in Tonganoxie. I’m more aware now that sometimes life’s best transitions are those that happen gradually, one step at a time.

Last night my husband led me to the back of the house where the mock orange bush is planted.

“Look at that,” he said.

It was blooming.