Mike
heard of a kid willing to do yard work. The kid came Friday to inspect the job.
Someone else drove him and he brought a friend. (Red flags.) We don’t have a
lawn – just the weeds in the drought-tolerant rock garden – and I thought I
detected a look in his eye that said he didn’t really want to weed – kind of a
dubious “how-do-I-get-out-of-this?” look. However, he agreed to come today to
work.
Today
came. The appointed hour came. The kid didn’t come. We remained hopeful that he
was just late.
Meanwhile,
I was looking for a trowel he could use, and I couldn’t find it in the pail in
which we keep yard tools.
“I
always put it back in the pail,” said Mike, his eyes flashing in my direction.
“So
do I,” I flashed back and added that I thought the day was already difficult enough without
arguing about the yard tools.
Mike
left on his new Yamaha 250 street-legal dirt bike to buy a trowel for the kid
to use – you know, the kid who wasn’t here. I would have been happy to go, but
Mike saves gas money by running errands on a motorcycle. It’s sort of the same
thing as saving money on embellished towels by buying expensive sewing
machines. To each his own, I say.
One
thing always leads to another, doesn’t it? That shelf where we keep
fertilizers, yard tools, potting soil and the like was a real mess, and now
that I knew it, I had to clean it. When Mike got home he suggested I use the
small shop vac to clean up some weed killer the mice had spilled – and then he
did the work. What a deal! And I gathered the open and partially used sacks of
this and that, emptying some into the vegetable garden and packing others to take to the farm. Some of that stuff came with us when we
moved here. Time to get rid of it!
The
kid didn’t show, so I joined Mike in the rock garden for an hour of weeding. No
sooner had I started than I happened to glance up at the roof – and there it
was! – my garden trowel – perched there above the eaves trough where someone had
left it. 
Mike
admitted that he was the responsible party since cleaning the eaves troughs is not
my job. He good-naturedly went after the ladder and retrieved the trowel. KW
4 comments:
Well, of course, LOL.
And have you noticed that when they can't find something they will ask you? Sometimes I do know as I've noticed it, but lots of times I don't know. ;~)
You're on a roll!!
On another note, help is just about impossible to find these days. I guess the kid wouldn't have wanted to hoe beans for thirty-five cents an hour, either...
You're right, Dr. Molly. I just don't always know where everything is, especially Mike's stuff. I was proud of my son when he admitted he can't find anything unless it's right where he expects it to be. "If she moves it six inches, I can't find it," he admitted.
Chris -- I remember my parents calling the employment agency when they needed help with this or that. Men sat there waiting for an opportunity to earn a little money. Of course, those days are gone for a myriad of reasons. It seems like a sad state of affairs that there are jobs that Americans don't want to do because it's also an unwillingness to serve your fellow man.
Like housework, the weeding is never done and won't stay done. We have to develop a philosophy about it so that it's not making us unhappy. The overall effect is what we wanted to achieve.
Kids these days! Unbelievable....(yet believable).
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