How to describe the events I’m thinking about? Luck seems like when my husband can most always find a parking space close to our destination (as I repeat: “we should have left earlier, we will never find a place to park”), while serendipity seems a light-hearted term for important happenings.
But I want to make note of such occurrences – in part because I keep thinking about two recent ones, and in part to counter the opposite kind of event – bad things that come out of nowhere like accidents or illnesses. Plenty of those around.
One night, during a trip in February, with the Ladies Baby and Sweet, Baby Brother, and their parents, we emerged from a restaurant into a rainstorm. We had a walk ahead to get home, and huge, fat drops quickly threatened a drenching. As we turned the corner around a building, a man stood under an overhang and said: “How about an umbrella – just a dollar?” “Oh, look,” he added, “I have two.” I dug in my already soaked purse and gladly bought both.
In the following days, the girls and I talked off and on about Umbrella Man, as we called him, how he appeared by magic to offer us shelter just when we needed it, like in a storybook
Planning for that February trip included much worry about leaving Frances. The mother of our young friend had told me about the website, “Trusted Housesitters.” If you are in need of care for pets and house, you register on the site, pay a fee of about a hundred dollars, describe your home, its location, and pet(s), enter the dates of your travel, and wait.
People (often retired folks who love both animals and travel) contact you and offer their services. The sitters pay their own transportation to you, and they don’t charge. Sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. In December a capable woman from Vancouver Island (who lives on a boat in the summer) stayed with Frances and took very good care of everything.
But by mid-January I had no response to my posted dates for February. Belatedly I realized you could search sitters by geography and read their profiles and recommendations, so I took a chance and directly contacted a handful of people with open calendars who live in Western Washington.
An amazing couple answered (their reviews from past sits are over the moon). Adventurous empty nesters who work from home, they don’t usually do local sits, they’ve done housesits in England in the past, but they wrote to say they would be glad to come to the bluff and care for Frances. I was grateful and relieved.
As time passed and Frances began to fail, my instructions and worries multiplied, and our correspondence increased. Our fairy godparent housesitters, as I came to think of them, adapted to all my anxious changes and special requests for Frances’ care. In the end, we didn’t need all my notes, and after a departure delay, we left a sadder, simpler house. The housesitters still came to stay and were so kind to us in a hard time, kindred spirits, now friends. The “Trusted Housesitters” site seems a miracle.
I’m reminding myself here to appreciate such serendipitous moments of grace, such offerings of kindness – and such good luck.
