“The RoseBouquet”

My elbows are sagging today, even my bones feel tired. But then, I’ve worked them pretty hard over the long weekend.

My sister Elsie, whose stuff is in storage here since 1995 when she moved to B.C. on the west coast, asked for an inventory of her stuff, so that she could decide what to let me put on the auction on July 6. So I put on an extra effort over this long weekend, to go through all her boxes, record the contents on my clipboard, and also write up a matching label which I taped to the boxes. In case I have to go looking for a certain one again, it will save opening a bunch! That’s a lot of handling of heavy boxes, never mind that sometimes I just took them down, wrote them up and put them back up on the shelves.

Anyway… I finished that inventory last night. Then as I went to bed I remembered that I forgot her trunk, and this morning I remembered a few other items too. So it isn’t all done.

Something amusing did happen on Saturday afternoon. I had cleared all her boxes off two shelf units Dad had built in his workshop for her stuff, and I transferred them to a third one, hoping to pack tidier and to free those two units to take upstairs. I wanted the smaller one up in the garage beside the ramp, so I could bring more auction sale stuff up to the garage.

When I had removed the last shelf from that unit and was laying it down, I said mostly to myself, but perhaps as a prayer, “There! Now I just need a man, Lord. I don’t think I can carry this upstairs by myself!”

Just then I gashed my finger against the sharp edge of another shelf board, so I went to the bathroom and put on a bandaid.

Before I’d quite finished, the doorbell rang. I ran up to get it, and there was a man! Larry, my next door neighbour was standing there. I said, “Hey, you’re an answer to prayer! I need help bringing a shelving unit up to the garage.” Then I added, “Well, maybe I should ask first what you wanted.”

He asked about borrrowing Dad’s rotortiller while theirs was being fixed, but he was quite willing to come help me with the shelf unit first.

Basically, it’s two ladders, joined by an X at the back, made of baseboard trim material. Larry’s solution was to knock the bracing off the one ladder, making it two parts. I carried up one, and he followed with the other. In the garage I found him a hammer, and he put the bracing back in place.

Of course, that’s when I realized I had not cleaned up under the ramp yet, so I ate clouds of dust while I pulled out the fiberglass insulation Dad had stashed there, and made room for this shelving unit.

And naturally, I let him borrow the rotortiller.

I told this story in church on Sunday, and several people had fun with the concept of praying for a man, and getting such a quick answer.