A Road Less Travelled

 I have dragged, pushed and carried an odd assortment of things down our street. The oddest that comes to mind was a rolling hamper full of dirty clothes. A few hours later I rolled that same hamper now full of clean clothes up the street. I’ve seen people walking stoves down the street and, when we moved, Sanford and Sons walked our stove, refrigerator and freezer down the street. But today I felt ridiculous.

We still have some things at the old house. We have two picnic tables, a jungle gym and we used to have a plastic playhouse. Today I was feeling young and full of energy so I went to the old house prepared to carry the playhouse back with me. Well, it turns out that the playhouse is actually much heavier than I thought it was. And the playhouse didn’t seem to want to come apart at the seams like it should have. Okay, I thought, I’ll just lug it down as it is. This was a good plan except that the playhouse wouldn’t fit through the gate. I pushed, I pulled, I even bent a gate post out a bit, but still the playhouse refused to fit through the gate. Finally, I managed to flip the playhouse up and over the gate. It landed with a crash and I was all ready to haul it away.

It is hard to feel dignified when one is pulling a plastic, pastel playhouse down the street. The pastel colors seem to lack a certain something and when the house catches on every bump and hillock one’s motions lack smoothness and grace. Thankfully, there were very few people out and about. I only saw two neighbors and a couple complete strangers. I got the playhouse all the way down the street, across the street, up the driveway and right to the gate before I noticed a disquieting fact. Our new gate is the same width as our old gate. The playhouse wouldn’t fit through the fence. And since our fence is about six feet tall there was no way I was going to be able to flip the playhouse over it by myself.

Not to fear!, I said to myself. There are plenty of children about. In fact, there were three children out in the back yard. Arianna, Samuel and Noah were very happy to see their playhouse, but not very confident in my plan to get it over the fence. I had just made Noah sit down at the kid’s picnic table to keep him out of the danger zone and had arranged Arianna and Samuel on one side of the playhouse when I heard a shout from the street. The man who had lived across the street from us before we moved had noticed my plight and come to help. He and I flipped the playhouse over the fence with no problems and then chatted about our house. He used to live in our house when it had been three apartments. After he left the kids and I put the playhouse together and they were very excited. It really makes our backyard look like ours. 

As I’m writing this a thought occurs to me. We still have two picnic tables and a jungle gym left at the little house. There is no way I’ll be able to get them here by myself. I have decided I’m not even going to try.