I enjoy doing things for other people, but I have a hard time accepting it when people do nice things for me. I feel like I need to return the favors, with interest. If I can't do it right away, I carry guilt over the debt. Twice this year, the man who mows the lawn for my neighbor on my right has mowed the entire wedge of lawn we share, all the way to my driveway. It's a small effort, but I have yet to see him in action, much less get to say thanks. The best I could do was get outside and take my turn at the same wedge of grass today, and I had to hurry to complete it (and the other side and the back) before the rains came. I managed to do it, and I'm hoping that the torrential rain washes away the evidence that I don't own a blower to clear the clippings from her driveway. We are under a flash flood warning all night, and enough rain has come down already that no one is going to be mowing for days. I got it in just in time.
I ventured out in the rain this evening, to select a paint color for the first condo to be reconstructed. My daughter and I have agreed on a cool pale gray to go through most of the unit, and I sent the paint chip number to the project manager. I keep going back and forth between stressing over whether they get the color right (either buying from the same store or color matching), and not caring what color it is, as long as it is finally repaired and the girls can go live in it while the other unit is repaired. After all these months, I think the "just make it livable" side is winning. This has gone on too long.
After I texted the paint chip picture to the rebuild team, I went grocery shopping. I had barely made it to the produce section (always my first stop) when my phone rang. My octogenarian neighbor was calling, to ask me to bring her food. At first, I thought she sounded a little confused, like she was having a dementia moment and was just musing that she was hungry. But then she sounded much clearer, and she explained that her daughter (who has been keeping me in the loop of her own declining health) was feeling poorly after having a complete GI series run yesterday, and with effort they had convinced her to try to eat something, and she settled on fried chicken. They just needed someone capable of venturing out by car to get it. Once I understood the dilemma, I agreed to bring it, thinking to myself that it was a small gesture of good will, and this, combined with being on top of mowing all around would help refill my karmic savings account. (The neighbor ended up giving me cash for the meal, so it felt a little less grand of a gesture and more like delivery, but still.) As I hung up the phone and put it away, I heard "The Things We Do for Love" on the grocery store intercom. That song kept running through my head as I was trying to keep my umbrella over the hot food to keep it dry, returning my shopping cart to the store in the driving rain, trodding through ankle deep puddles, and crushing sopping mole tunnels between the houses to hand off the food. I will say that I must be a good person, to put up with the smell of freshly fried chicken under my nose in the shopping cart, filling up my car on the drive home, and in the kitchen while the family and I talked while I was next door. Do you have any idea how good fried chicken smells to someone who has only recently given up eating anything with breading on it? Maybe I need a medal for that gesture after all.
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