You never know

Holy cow! Where has the time gone? It seems like just yesterday I was bemoaning the fact that there were Christmas trees being serenaded by carols in the stores and it was not yet Halloween and now those things are actually seasonally appropriate.

Remember when it seemed like it took F O R E V E R for Christmas to arrive?

Now? Not so much.

We took part in our communities’ annual Rake Up Boise – an event that we’ve participated in since our daughter was in middle school. We’ve raked with a middle school team, a Mensa team, a Civil Air Patrol team, an AFS team and a team from my office. Some years we’ve gone out with more than one team if they were raking on different days. This year’s team was from the office and I was the coordinator. Counting kids, we had 55 participants. And we raked up about 150 bags of leaves.

When you have a big group like that, it goes very quickly! And is accompanied by much frivolity. We’ve been known to rake not only the yards assigned to us (4 this year), but sometimes the neighboring yards. Since one of our houses had a neighboring yard FULL of leaves, we decided to rake them up as well so that they wouldn’t get blown into the yard we had just cleaned up. Sometimes when we do that, we have a lot of fun with the reactions of the occupants of the “extra” house (since they’re not expecting a huge group of people to attack their leaves). This year, we had a more sobering experience. In the words of one of our rakers from an e-mail she sent to the office the Monday after we raked:

As those of you who were there may recall, after we finished our four "assigned" houses we decided to do an additional house, almost as an after-thought. As I was helping rake up the leaves, I noticed an elderly gentleman walk out of this house and he looked perplexed, but also sad. He walked over to my boyfriend and spoke to him for a long while. Afterwards, [BF] walked up to me and shared their conversation.

The man asked [BF] what was going on, who were we? After [BF] explained that we were all from [lawfirm] (and/or friends and family members) and we were participating in Rake Up Boise as a community event the man asked if he could pay us. [BF] reassured him that no, we wouldn’t accept anything from the man and just wanted to help out people like him for Rake Up Boise. At that point, the man got teary eyed and told [BF] that our timing was amazing because at 3 am last night his daughter-in-law passed away and his family was going to be showing up at his home later than morning. So, he really appreciated our help and couldn't believe the timing. Later, the man and his wife left the house and stopped to talk to a group and reiterated his sincere thanks. Again, he was teary eyed in giving his heart-felt thanks. Looks like we happened to be in the right place at the right time.

I just wanted to share this with all of you . . . You never know how much a kind gesture means to its recipient until something like this happens.

You really do never know.