“Dear toothfariry” or Why First Husband has Bragging Rights
So First Husband and I patted ourselves on the back for installing wood floors in place of the SamCat-soaked wall-to-wall carpeting. And then we looked for another DIY project. During the flooring marathon, we made nearly daily runs to the hardware store for stuff. And when we put the leftover stuff away, we found enough duplicate masking tape and staples to never buy more and still have loads to bequeath to several generations of descendants.
Time to clean out, clear out, organize the garage. By ‘we’ I really did mean both of us, but then I had an inspiration. (That does not always mean I just gave myself a headache.) I fell on this plan to recycle the old garage shelves in the basement storage room. In the garage we’d replace the shelving with neat and tidy cabinets with doors and locking devices to keep the mice out.
Yeah. You want to know just how much of the leftover cooking wine I’d ‘tasted’ to think we can Ever lock out the mice. They sneak in to get out the winter cold. Sneak in when it’s too hot out or too dry. Oh, come on. They don’t even sneak. Our first summer in our house in the woods we found a nearly comatose and about to burst mouse in the loosely lidded sunflower seed bucket. The learning curve was too steep for us that day. We hauled the bucket outside the garage and turned it on its side so the mouse could amble out. He did. Looked up at us, grinned, and raced, stomach dragging, back into the garage and disappeared. Turns out he was not a bachelor or childless.
So we began. First Husband was in charge of the garage; I was organizing the storage room where the old garage shelves were now living. I culled through years of memorabilia stored in old collapsing plastic bins and had a pretty impressive recycle bag going. And then I found it. A letter from our one and only child to the “toothfariry”. In pencil on notepaper with one red and one green dinosaur:
“Dear toothfariry,
Please leave my tooth because I want it. But still give me the money. “
If the “toothfariry” laughed as hard as I did, our child got that tooth back.
My sorting slowed to ice floe slow. I have to read everything before culling, no matter how often Mr.-I’m-So-Good First Husband strolls by bragging about getting the garage done in two days.
Kath
