Yesterday, I spent many of my daylight hours picking up sticks.
This is not an uncommon way for me to pass the better part of a day, living next to a forest as we do. I find myself being especially diligent in the stick relocation department now that we have the house on the market. The sticks, they keep a'fallin' regardless of the weather. But you know what really kickstarts a real stick fest? Tornadic activity.
In the wee hours of this morning, Ringo, my dog-slash-in-home severe weather alert system, woke up and began panting loudly and pacing frantically. (He has really long talon-like toenails, so you can imagine the clatter he makes walking with his short legs all over the hardwood floors.) My first thought: Death to you, Ringo James! Go back to sleep you crazy storm-a-phobe; it is not even raining!
It promptly began to pour rain, and rumble, and flash. The wind was howling. I made my apologies to Ringo.
My second thought: NOOOOO!!! Wind equals increased stick deployment, and I just cleared all of the sticks from the entire yard in preparation for today's real estate showing!
Hours later (7 to showing), daylight revealed the devastation of my formerly pristine and stick-free yard. In addition to being covered in an assortment of sticks, bark, and other tree shrapnel, the yard was flooded due to hours of torrential rains.
Hours to showing: 5. Brooke and I were driving Alyssa to school when a tornado warning was declared. You know what that means? Pull over and hide in a ditch? Well, yes. That and: Infinitessimally more sticks.
Hours to showing: 3. The local weatherman, Joe Calhoun, suspended the tornado warning. School children were allowed to leave the cinderblock hallways and return to their window-full classrooms. Normal people were allowed to re-emerge from safety of their basements. And, since sticks were no longer flying sideways (or spiraling upwards)...but merely falling downwards at normal gravitational velocity, I decided it was a good time for me to perform stick remediation.
As I was trudging through my flooded yard in tall rain boots, collecting sticks in the left-over rain, I couldn't help but to feel thankful that sticks were all I had to pick through post-storm. Sure, it was a major inconvenience to have a severe storm with damaging winds and flooding on the same day as my showing, not to mention wildly ironic that we have a tornado watch directly after I do an all-out stick pick-up, but compared to the poor people in the tornado-addled Midwest, I have no complaints!
The moral of this story: When--on the same day as you happen to have a real estate showing--life hands you tornadic activity, make a big pile of tree shrapnel afterwards. And hide said pile in the woods. And, thusly, make buyers believe that living here is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy...and involves no stick pick-up at all.
No, I won't miss sticks when we move. There are just so many of them...and so little time in which to pick them up.
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