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
