This
is Steve.
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| This is Steve's truck, not mine. I have a 2001 Dodge Dakota, a mid-sized pickup. |
On a day when I
should have stayed in the house and tried not to hurt myself or do major damage to anything in the house, at a time when my inner DITZ (as in “ditzy”)
is on full display and successfully avoiding my feeble attempts to keep her in
check, and when I really, really shouldn’t have attempted to cut a load of
firewood, Steve saved my bacon, and did a lot more.
Steve
to the Rescue. It’s a story that
perhaps began yesterday. I say “perhaps”
because I try to forget about the times my DITZ is loose to discombobulate my
very existence.
So,
yesterday I cut up a rack of spareribs and put them in the crock pot, anticipating
a tasty dinner when I returned from picking up litter. When I got home, I could smell the scent of cooking
pork as I removed my boots and changed into clean clothing in the garage.
Oddly,
I couldn’t detect the luscious aroma of Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce, and I
realized that I didn’t recall pouring the sauce over the meat. As I headed to the kitchen, I also couldn’t
remember putting the lid on the crock pot.
And so it was. No sauce, no lid,
no ribs for dinner. I turned the pot to
low and let the ribs cook all night.
I
should have known better. Once the DITZ
is loose, my attempts as being a responsible, capable adult come to naught. Nonetheless.
I
unloaded the litter-picking paraphernalia from the truck and loaded the firewood-cutting
paraphernalia. Off I went, a few miles
up the highway to where the US Forest Service has made decks of timber
available for firewood.
I
found some wood I wanted and started cutting.
A rain shower passed through and I went to the truck and closed the
windows, successfully locking my truck keys IN the truck when I closed the
door. I looked at the fellow cutting
across the dirt road from me and begged a ride to my house to get my spare
keys.
I
didn’t tell him, but I also needed to get a right-hand glove as I’d managed to
bring two left-hand gloves.
We
introduced ourselves and chatted on the way.
His name is Steve and he lives about a mile from me, though we’d never
before met. He's a geologist with the USFS. Then we returned to the
decks of timber and went to work.
I
cut a bunch of hemlock (a heavy wood compared to spruce). Steve must have
seen me struggling to load my truck.
I’ll
make this short. He told me to pull down
where he’d been cutting and finished loading my truck. I loaded the smaller wood and he did the heavy-lifting.
I
started for home to unload the truck and half-way there, I remembered that I’d
put the spare keys on a narrow ledge where the cap on the truck’s bed met the
truck wall. I stopped and looked. No keys!
I’d lost the spare keys.
When
I reached home, I unloaded the truck, all the while bemoaning the expense of
replacing the keys and the all-important electronic fob. As I threw out the final piece, I looked
down and there were the keys, nicely nestled in the sawdust in the truck bed.
Back
at the wood-cutting site, Steve was loading his own ¾-ton truck with wood that
he then drove to my house and unloaded for me!
“I
don’t know how to thank you,” I said.
“Those
two words are enough,” he said. “But I’ll
tell you what. You pick up the highway
litter than I don’t and we’ll call it even.”
“Let
me know when you want another load of wood,” he said, giving me his phone
number.
I
wonder if Steve always helps ditzy old women, but I’m sure glad he helped this
one.
PS: If there's one thing I'm really, really good at, it's making messes and getting dirty.
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| Sawdust all over my bottle of tea. |
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| What the well-dressed ditzy old woman wears. |