With Friends Like These…
I have this friend. First, he recommends my services to a patient who needs physical therapy. This patient just happens to be a former patient of his and he has offered the man and his wife the use of his guest house below the big house for a few months until their home is built. So yesterday, I go there for my first visit to see the patient, and beforehand friend Joe fixes us a big lunch (and then all I wanted to do then was go somewhere and take a nap!) After my patient visit, he had offered me the chance to cut a truckload of wood from his nice, level, mature hardwood forest; so I brought my overalls and the chain saw; and Joe goes with me and loads it onto the truck as I cut it. I am overwhelmed.
I left Joe's and on my way back toward town, lo and behold the infrequently-open-for-business bookstore is actually open! This is an old store on the highway where a newly relocated bibliophile has deposited her life collection (three truckloads of books, she told me) and is now selling them, mostly for $2 a piece. I brought home six (Hal Borland, Michael Frome, and others) and they will be temporarily shelved on the floor where they sit in their shopping bags until I build more bookshelves. Can a person ever have enough book shelves? I'm thinking of putting a shelf up near the ceiling in the "kid's room" upstairs and maybe in Ann's study.
And when I got home, I found an email saying one of my little doodahs has been accepted for publication. This man is editor of the southern arts magazine where my stuff will show up in a future issue... what a neat bookstore this is, back in my hometown! So, now I will be a professional writer. I get paid-- two copies of the magazine. Hey. Gotta start somewhere!
Now, it's Saturday morning and I have work to do... thanks to some recent help from my friends. Two days ago, just as I was walking in the door from recording another essay (broadcast announcement forthcoming) the phone rang. A neighbor up the road heard I needed a couple of downed trees relocated with tractor power (one was a 16" birch that spanned the creek; the other-- a 15" walnut dropped by the power company--was lying up on a bank too steep for safely using a chain saw). My neighbor (new to the road, I've talked with him two or three times) called (on his day off) and told me he could be here in 45 minutes to help. He wouldn't let me refuse. So, a short while later in the cold wind, we wrapped a chain around each of these massive trees, and with the amazing horsepower of his trusty Ford 4WD tractor, they now lie out in the open on level ground, waiting for the old reliable Stihl and a little spit and sweat equity.
Then, this morning I got a nice treat wrapped in an email from a good blogging buddy. You've caught me in an intense moment of warm fuzzies induced by the kindness of friends I've never met, strangers I've just met, neighbors I can never repay, and friends who feed me and keep me warm. Faith, hope and charity. I feel the charity and hope to pass it on.
We have another "winter event" heading our way tonight, so, after one more cup of coffee, I'd better get out and make sawdust.
Comments
Wood for the fire. Books for the mind. Friends all around. What more does one need? Simply to remember that co-incidence is never accidental. --Tom
Posted by: Tom Montag | January 24, 2004 8:39 AM
Sounds like my kinda weekend!
Posted by: ronbailey | January 24, 2004 9:15 AM
Wow...you wouldn't be an Aries would you?
If so, get ready, Mars will not be in retrograde in 2004.
;-)
Posted by: feste | January 24, 2004 12:08 PM
Published!!! Congratulations. Oh, the thrill! High fives to you, fred! You say it best yourself, in that you've only just begun. "Gotta start somewhere". You are on your way.
Loved hearing of the rich abundance that has come your way through various generous sources. It must be comforting to have such tangible evidence that you have connected with people. The exchange of favors is friendship indeed.
As to the sawdust ... I don't know if it's the secret country farm girl hidden deep inside me, or what. There never was a sweeter smell. The smell of sawdust mingled with the sweat of working men is one of those things that just sends me over the top. Sweat equity, and firewood is born. The rumble and whine of the saw as it does its work. The fragrance of the sawdust living in the air. I breathe it in.
Posted by: ntexas99 | January 24, 2004 12:34 PM
Congrats on the print publication! What a heady sensation.
Hope you don't leave the blogworld, though. I'm also enjoying some books and some firewood here in chilly Pocahontas County WV.
Posted by: Rebecca Clayton | January 24, 2004 5:20 PM
Congrats from me too.
Posted by: Trey | January 24, 2004 6:02 PM
That's exactly how life is meant to be when it is at its best. It couldn't happen to a better man. I'm as happy about it all as if it had happened to me. Come to think about it....It has! More than once. God Bless us...everyone.
Posted by: Clarence | January 25, 2004 3:52 AM
Overwhelming, Fred! Congratulations on publication--we await your further successes.
Posted by: Cop Car | January 25, 2004 9:04 AM