A Pot of Gold

When I spring-cleaned the house not so long ago, I kept discovering 5 cent pieces all over the house, not to mention, a number of apples with only one bite in them! And pens, the ones you repeatedly put in a specific place in front of the phone but mysteriously disappear! Now there were several of them. After, going out and buying a whole bunch, thinking surely you won’t run out of pens this time, when the next thing you know, you are searching for that wretched pen, just when you have a person left suspended on the other end of the phone line, who can only spare a minute or two. Someone get me a pen!! A ‘someone’ (after you actually mention a name) begins searching, you are waiting with bated breath, hopes rising, when he/she returns with “I can’t find one, Mum”. You are rummaging through the junk drawer, your hands land on a pen, ok you’re ready, so you think, only to discover to your horror that the pen has no ink. You hurriedly tell the person on the other end that you will have to call them back, and then realize the information you were meaning to write down was in fact their phone number! You ask him for it, hoping your memory skills will serve you in your time of need. He rattles it off at break-neck speed, and you are frantically repeating the number over and over in your head, hoping you won’t forget it. As you put the handset down, you spy a marker pen, and now for paper…..where’s some paper? Now in a state of panic, you write it on your hand instead, hoping the kids wouldn’t notice that you are doing what you have told them not to do a million times over, knowing full well you will be wearing that number for 2-3 days - the marker is a permanent one. Anyone have a handy tip for getting permanent marker off skin? (Like the time, my 5 year old decided to put the toilet freshener in the toilet all by herself, Blue Loo, it was called. It was certainly BLUE, a deep, dark, hard blue! It took me days of baths and scrubbing soap, to get the blue off her stomach, hands, chin, and from under her nose. Immediately after which she had to get her passport photo taken, her upper-lip sporting a shade of pale blue. Surprisingly it didn’t show on the photo….Phew!!).

As for the coins, I kept slipping them into my pocket, and after some time my pocket was somewhat bulging, so I transferred them to a jar. At the end of the day, I inspected my findings…. a jar half-full of 5 cent pieces, 10 pens of assorted colours, paperclips and a handful of hair-ties, several game pieces, a die, and chocolate wrappers. There was a bunch of oddities thrown in as well, that to this day, I cannot put my finger on to what they were. They were thingy-a-me-bobbies. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”?

The coins added up to $4.50 – Just enough for a good cup of coffee and a jam-filled donut. After a long day of cleaning the house, I had struck my pot of gold.

Copyright 2006. Rebecca Laklem.