Good Deeds

It's balmy here today.  My boss sprang me from work a little early.  If the ground weren't so wet, I'd be trying to crank a tiller right now.

On the way home from work, I passed a pick-up truck pulled to the side of the road with its flashers flashing.  I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a woman trying to load what I thought was a sheet of plywood onto the truck.  The wind was blowing so hard that she was struggling.  I turned around at the next driveway and went back, intending to help her. 

When I got there, I saw that it wasn't plywood; it was plastic-backed styrofoam, the stuff they use now-a-days to sheathe houses.  She had a big stack of it, probably a dozen or more pieces securely wrapped in plastic.  There were several more pieces laying in the ditch.  I helped her turn the sheet sideways so that it would not catch the wind.  Naturally, as soon as we slid it atop the stack and bent down to pick up the rest of the sheets, it blew away again.  She ran to grab it, and when she turned into the wind to come back, the wind snapped the sheet right in two.  All that was holding it together was the plastic backing.  We slid it in beside the stack, and, somehow, managed to pick up the rest of the styrofoam sheets without breaking them. 

We leaned them against the side of the truck, and I held them down while she rummaged around in the truck bed for some rope.  She came up empty-handed.  I asked her to hold the sheets while I checked my Jeep.  Sure enough, my knitting bag was in the back seat, and there was a ball of yarn in it.  I grabbed the yarn and went back to the truck. 

We caught a lull in the wind and were able to get all of the styrofoam sheets back onto the stack.  She held them down while I cut a long piece of yarn, doubled it over, and tied it through the holes in one side of the truck bed.  I ran to the other side of the truck and poked the yarn though the hole on that side.  When I gave it a firm pull to tighten the slack and tie a knot, the yarn cut through the top piece of styrofoam like a hot knife through butter.  About that time, another stiff wind hit, and both pieces flew out of the truck bed and sailed across the road like Frisbees.  The rest of the unwrapped sheets followed.  Some of them went over a fence into a pasture.  Others landed in a steep ditch. 

"I'm calling my son!" she said, and she got out her cell phone and told her son to get there, pronto, and bring some rope. 

I started trying to gather up the pieces that were strewn all over the roadside, but she said to leave it, and she would make her son get it.  

Geez, I felt kind of bad about cutting that sheet in two with my yarn.  She might have been better off without my help!