After a week of cycling in the cool and breezy weather of Nova Scotia, I was shocked when I came home to the brutal heat and humidity of a Tallahassee summer. Fortunately, my husband had kept our garden and yard well-watered while I was gone, so I didn’t find the death and destruction I feared when I looked around the following morning.

Except.

There are three flowering plants I placed in metal holders attached to a funky bicycle sculpture my daughter gave us. The narrow holders are the perfect size for a little clay pot, but too narrow to accommodate a reservoir pan.

So, while every other potted plant, herb and vegetable in our yard continued to thrive in the heat while I was gone, my bicycle plants withered and died. They had received the same amount of watering as the other potted plants, but without a backup source to tap into, like an extended root system or a reservoir pan, they couldn’t survive the relentless sun and heat.

Contemplating how I might MacGyver a better system for the bicycle plants, I thought about my own root system and reservoir of support.

The day before, I had woken up at 4:00 am in Halifax (3:00 am EST) to begin my return trip to Tallahassee. The flight into LaGuardia arrived late, but my connecting flight was also late, so I made it to Atlanta (late) only to find that my flight to Tallahassee was also running late.

I thought it was odd when I saw people sleeping with their carry-on bags on the floors of the concourses between the terminals at the Atlanta airport, but I was in a hurry to make my connection to Tallahassee, and didn’t bother to ask. I later learned a hailstorm had caused hundreds of flight delays and cancellations on Thursday and Friday, leaving thousands of people stranded at the Atlanta airport.

A few minutes before its scheduled boarding time, my delayed flight to Tallahassee was canceled. My original itinerary had me arriving in Tallahassee at 1:39 pm EST. After waiting for an hour in the Delta “help line”, I was issued a standby ticket on a 3:20 flight which was also running late. At boarding time, I waited anxiously with 27 other standby passengers to hear my name (it was like a scene out of the Hunger Games), but I didn’t make the cut.

By this time, it was 6:30 pm and there was one remaining flight to Tallahassee scheduled to leave at 8:30 pm. I had not eaten anything but airplane snack mix since I left Halifax. I had explored other options, but there were no rental cars available, no hotel rooms and most of the people in the terminal had been stranded at the airport for more than 24 hours.

There were about eight of us who had been orphaned by the earlier flight, and we were all anxious to get seats on that last flight. We gathered around the ticket agent’s desk to beg for a confirmed seat. But the flight was already full, and without a confirmed seat, there was no guarantee we would be able to get on. As we listened to the exhausted agent explain the confluence of missed connections and no-shows that would have to occur for us to get seats, my phone rang. It was the nursing facility where my stepmom was living.

I walked away from the counter – hoping I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to get a confirmed seat – and took the call. Before she completed a sentence, I could tell from the tone of the nurse’s voice my stepmom had passed away. She told me Joan had died peacefully in her bed a few minutes earlier. My family had been anticipating this – as I wrote in my first blog post, A Time for Everything. My stepmother had been slowly saying goodbye for the past several months, but the news still hit hard. When the call ended, my knees started to tremble. I looked over at the negotiating session still going on with the ticket agent and couldn’t move.

I desperately wanted to get home to my reservoir of support. I was hungry, thirsty, sleep deprived and emotionally spent. My faith, my family and my friends are typically a reliable backup system that provides a reservoir of support for me when I get knocked down.

But standing in that terminal, at the mercy of an airline trying to accommodate thousands of stranded passengers with too few planes, my backup system could not help me. I was a hostage to the airline industry. And like my little bicycle plants, I felt withered. Physically and emotionally.

I returned to the desk where the harried agent had just sent the other flight orphans on their way with standby tickets and asked what my options were. She gave me a stern look and said, “just wait” – while she helped another passenger.

When she finished, she looked me in the eyes and handed me a ticket with a confirmed seat. What? She smiled and told me she could tell by the look on my face I needed to get home tonight. I burst into tears, went around the counter and gave her a huge hug of thanks.

I hadn’t told her about my stepmother passing. And there were people who had been waiting longer than me. But for some reason, she decided to extend an act of kindness and compassion to me. She had refilled my reservoir.

When I finally touched down in Tallahassee after 10:30 pm, it had been a long, frustrating day. But when that agent reached across the ticket counter and met me in my despair, she flipped the whole situation into a positive – for a cranky stranger she had never met and probably will never see again.

I wonder if that was my stepmom’s final gift to me. Not the seat on the plane, but the reminder that acts of kindness are never wasted – especially toward strangers. Because your generosity might be just what is needed to pick someone up off the floor and get back in the game.

I hope I never forget this lesson – and I hope I will soon have an opportunity to pay forward that ticket agent’s kindness to a stranger.

Thank you, Joan and rest in peace!

“Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in action and truth.” (1 John 3:18)