Saturday, December 2, 2017

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY

    It’s not every day I sit at my desk at my old XP computer. However, yesterday I had a few things I wanted to scan and knew I could do them more quickly positioned there.
    As I was busily approaching the end of my projects, I glanced out the window where I saw the now familiar golf cart pulling an open wagon, slowing to a stop in front of our house. A neighbor travels and that reminded me, “Oh, I meant to text (neighbor) to remind her that we’re home enough that if she wanted to leave a note for packages to be left here, we’d be happy to keep them until she is back to get them.”
     As I continued to watch, I became more convinced I should have made the offer to my neighbor sooner, because the boxes the young man and young woman were taking off the trailer, AND piling up, made it impossible for me to turn away. At some point our dogs caught sight of the happenings and when their barking increased, the pace my heartbeat did as well! That young couple were coming up OUR walk with some of those boxes stacked in their arms, then making a quick return back and forth to do likewise, delivering fourteen boxes altogether! If you find it difficult to believe what I am saying, you should have been with me to see what I was seeing! Oh, well, here is a picture:

is it worth a thousand words?  :-)
    By then, I was at the front door, and all I could say to the young folks was, “Our son is always joking . . .” Since Chip and Sue were in Maine this past summer and each of the boxes had the name of a city in Maine, BIDDEFORD, as part of their permanent print. That was enough for me to make an automatic connection, but the boxes also seemed to indicate the contents were electric mattress pads, twin and king-size. Since they were clearly addressed to him, after John got home, he opened a couple of the boxes that indeed, did contain electric mattress pads.
     Receiving those when we did seemed akin to the “late Friday afternoon Political News Dump”. It also brought to mind one May evening in Maine many years ago. John came in from a trip to the coast saying, “I brought something home for supper.” In his arms he was cradling only one box and there were scritch-scratch sounds emanating from it. I immediately though “lobsters”. I was wrong that time too! It was, up until that moment ,motherless baby raccoons, You noticeI did say, “Up until that moment”? At that moment those babies had five hearts with five sets of willing hands to “mother” them as they’d never before been nurtured! But, before we could securely do so, we had to check with a friend who said he’d let the game warden know because it was illegal to have them (Oops!) and if he came, we’d have to give them to him. The way he explained the law was, once you have them, you cannot return them to the woods, you cannot keep them, you cannot give them away, you cannot kill them . . .so-o-o, we “mothered” them and kept them away from the 70 mph highway past our house that they not suffer the same fate as their mother had. They had a home with us like fast-growing puppies, until the early fall, when we asked a friend who had a fur-bearing license if he’d add them to his menagerie. Thankfully he agreed to do so.  That way we didn’t break any laws and we got to go back to visit.
    Hopefully these boxes won’t be with us anywhere near as long as those raccoon babies were. We have taken them in for now so Santa, if you’re pacing some store floor somewhere in Missouri where the John Moore we have come to believe these mattress pads were met to meet, they have a Texas home until someone comes calling for them. (Perhaps I need rephrase that: if no one comes calling for them, there will, of absolute necessity, be a space crunch in our patio home, You see, because I wanted and my brother made, a wooden sign, “WESTWIND HOUSE” for our 3-bedroom patio home, there have been folks who have mistaken it for something other than a private dwelling. Just yesterday morning I posted an explanation about that on my blog
    I’ve had to laugh as I’ve considered what those young ones thought as they delivered so many mattress pads to such a small home!  Westwind House would have to have beds throughout the whole house packed nearly as tightly as the boxes presently are in our front hall. Oh, well, it doesn’t happen every day!
M Sue

12-2-17

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