Sandals

Yesterday morning at 4:40 a.m. I took my wife to the hospital for a scheduled surgery. My son, wife and I piled into my car and took off.

We are a family of scavengers. We regularly stop the car for garage sales, kittens, turtles, and even tarantulas. We don't always keep them. We are just intensely curious. Sometimes we do find treasures that make it back to our house, but not always. Recently, our treasures have included bungie cords, pieces of chain, a watch and even lawn furniture.

Yesterday morning we added to our collection of treasures. Just as we turned from Gaddy Road onto Clear Pond road we saw a conspicuous pile of brown in the middle of the road.

Sherry asked, "Was that horse poo?"

As I drove past the pile, I braked and then put the car into reverse. I replied, "I don't know, but I am going to check."

Okay, you may be wondering why in the world a sane person would interrupt a trip to the hospital at 4:40 in the morning to check on brown horse poo. To be honest, I don't know why we did, but we did. Maybe it was just that the pile didn't look right. Well, it really didn't look right.

When I backed up to see what it was, my wife and I found that the conspicuous pile of brown was not horse poo. Instead, it was a brand new pair of men's sandals. I opened my door, picked them up, and then I handed them to my son, Sawyer. He complained a bit, but it was incomprehensible, so I drove on.

I began imagining how this pair of shoes ended up in the middle of a country road. In my mind, some tired fisherman put them on the tailgate of his pickup truck, drove off and then they just happened to fall right here on this smooth section of rural pavement. I was going to find out how wrong I was.

When we got to the hospital we got Sherry checked in and by 8:00 am Sherry was having her surgery. Everything went well. Dr. Wiens came out to the waiting room and told us that there was no sign of cancer. According to him the growth in her thyroid was a benign follicular adenoma. I was grateful.

Later, after Sherry made it out of recovery and back into her room, I went home to feed. I strolled out to my car, unlocked the door and climbed in. I was greeted by a thick, musty odor. I thought that I must have left the window down in the previous night's rainstorm. It smelled like hot, wet car.

I started out of the parking lot on my way to find some lunch. The car's unpleasant aroma became an all out, olfactory, frontal assault. It was pounding and insistent, growing with insidious intent. Suddenly, the incomprehensible comment that my son made early that morning became clear. "They're going to stink up the car." Apparently, he got a whiff of those mysterious brown sandals that my wife and I missed. I now understood why these nice brown sandals were sitting neatly in the middle of the road.

I knew that before I could eat I would have to do something about the smell, so at a deserted stop sign, I opened my door and deposited the offending sandals in a neat pile right there in the middle of the road.

It is amazing how sometimes the treasures that we seek, or even the treasures that we stumble upon end up costing us in ways that we never anticipate.