Lucky Me

It was 7 am and I was lying in bed listening to the gardener's roaring equipment waiting for them to hurry up and finish so I could go back to sleep. The door bell rang. I knew what this was going to be about. I wrapped myself in a robe and answered the door.

The gardener asked, "Did you know that your tree blew over?"

I could have given a sarcastic answer, but I just said yes. Really, though, how could one not notice such a thing? Even when I found it in the middle of the night and couldn't see it through the darkness, I knew something wasn't right. The house is never that dark, even in the middle of the night.

He told me how lucky I was. If it had fallen the other way, it would have taken out the wall. If it had landed a little differently, it could have smashed the house. He wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know, but I just politely agreed.

He offered to remove it for me. I didn't know he could do that kind of thing, but I'm glad that he can. It is one less thing for me to have deal with right now.

Because the tree is dangling over the patio cover, there is some risk that when he starts cutting the tree, it may cause the patio cover to collapse when the tree falls. If it happens, I will deal with it.

So, Friday is tree removal day. If nothing goes wrong, it's just another six hundred dollars from my bank account.

After our agreement, I tried to go back inside the house, but the door had locked behind me. I was barefoot and naked, except for a robe, locked out of the house. I went to get the hidden key that I have for such purposes. The key in a jar was submerged in a flower pot filled with rotting rain water. Reaching in the gunk to get the jar, I expected the jar to be be filled with water too and the key to be corroded, but it was fine. Once again I was lucky. Things didn't turn out as badly as they could have.