Rainbows and Kissing Puppy Dogs

Do you remember last Christmas when I was the recipient of a random act of kindness when someone left a large box of chocolates at my front door? I had posted about it on Facebook, hoping I’d be able to root out the person who did it. No such luck. I asked all my friends and family. No one fessed up. Yesterday I was talking to one of my neighbors---the one I’ve known the longest and who snow-blows my front sidewalk in the winters---and I asked her if she by chance left the chocolates. Nope, but she said she got a box at her door too! She did the same thing I did, checked it good for package tampering before eating it because at first, it creeped both of us out. While the mystery still remains a mystery at least now I know who ever left the box is someone I don’t know at all and who lives on my cul-de-sac…or maybe our local Jehovah Witnesses who do the door-to-door preaching from time to time? Maybe I got a payoff for always being polite and taking their pamphlets?

I was reminded of the chocolates because this past week I’ve been getting another kind of random act of kindness in the form of painted rocks left inside my mailbox. It’s dark inside that box and when I saw the first one I thought it was a wasp nest. Scared more than the crap out of me because I’m allergic to bees. If anyone was watching me with my can of Raid and a long-handled broom poking the rock out through the mailbox’s back door they were probably laughing they butts off. By the time I realized it wasn’t a wasp nest, I picked up that rock with its rainbow painted on its face and I was smiling from ear to ear. No one in my neighborhood could possibility know how much I like stones and rocks. I have jars full and an antique trencher from the seventeen hundreds that I keep special rocks in. My trencher-worthy stones don’t necessarily have to be pretty stones I’ve bought along life’s journey. Some are just rocks I’ve picked up on a day when I was having fun. (I need to look up the words ‘stone’ and ‘rock’. Can I correctly use them interchangeably? There's always something new to learn, isn't there.)

There are ten houses on my cul-de-sac and countless little kids and I don’t know any of them by name. Most of them want to pet Levi when I take him for walks. He’s been taught to sit when little kids approach him and to stay seated while they pet him which has earned praise from my chocolate receiving neighbor who is also a veterinary. The rocks in the mailbox got me to thinking about neighbors and how much we judge them by the way they treat their dogs and kids. Two little girls who live two doors down are not allowed to go past my driveway and two little boys who live down the block on the other side of me are not allowed to go past my neighbor’s driveway which means the boys and girls never get closer than 170 feet apart. One day that will change and that 170 foot kid-free zone will no longer exist. My romance reading soul has me seeing them in the future playing kissy-face in front of my house. If it was the 1950s their parents would then get phone calls tattling on them before they even got back home. They say it takes a village to raise kids and it took me years to figure out why I couldn’t get away with any boy-girl shenanigans as I walked home from school. My neighborhood was apparently filled with spies, busybodies and concerned mothers. Yes, it does take a village so I suppose I should have reported that Levi licked one little girl's face. She then sat right down in front of him and kissed him back. On the lips. Mouth kissing puppy dogs is yucky in some circles, but Levi didn't mind.

I did laundry yesterday. It might not sound like a big deal but I went a total of fourteen days without doing laundry when in pre-pandemic times I did it every Sunday. How do I know it was fourteen days and not thirteen or twelve? I didn’t until I ran out of underpants and I was giving them the Marie Kondo folds when they came out of the dryer. But my first clue that I needed clean clothes came when I had nothing left in my undies drawer but a pair I set aside to wear to doctor appointments and trips to Urgent Care. (You do that too, fess up.) With the pandemic stay-at-home orders in effect underpants are the only garments I’ve consistently change every single day. I quit wearing bras in the second week and I was reminded recently that I need to start wearing them again. The weather warmed up enough to walk the dog without me wearing a winter coat and I got half way down the sidewalk then promptly made a U-turn back into the house. Levi thought we took the shortest walk in canine history but I just needed to get my boobs in a hammock. No one wants see 'old girls' hanging free. And in case you ever need to take a pop quiz on my life, this paragraph contains the answer to the extra credit question.  ©