Sometimes a Gift is Just a Gift
Other times, not so much...
“Think we can get rid of that dryer downstairs?” Annie asked me Sunday morning.
She had been asking me that question off and on for a couple of years, and something told me that I should do more about it this time than nod affirmatively, which is what I usually do and then forget about it. She’s a saint.
We bought a used washer and dryer as a pair about three years ago for $200, not knowing that the dryer was an electric one that ran on either 220 or 240V. We didn’t have the proper connection, so the dryer sat unused in the basement all that time, gathering dust. We needed a gas drier.
Sunday was a beautiful day, and I’d spent much of the morning mowing while Annie was getting plants ready to be moved inside for winter, among other important things like laundry. I’d do dishes later. Annie has a green thumb, and we have a great many plants; so many that it seems as if they are going to take over the house.
Let me give you an example. Here is one that we moved from the back deck to storage in the basement Sunday below.
It was a “gift” to her, but it’s also what she calls a “rescue plant” that she took in about 30 years ago, and she suspects it was at least ten years old when she rescued it. Like all of her plants, she feels it was a gift to her, and she regularly reciprocates, gifting plants to others. We split and gave away a great many irises this summer, and hey, does anyone need some aloe plants?
The great, all-knowing Google suggests that this giant plant is a philodendron, maybe Thaumatophyllum xanadu. It’s native to Brazil but does just fine here. Inside a house during the winter, that is.
But back to the dryer. I pulled my pickup around back and loaded the dryer in. It was heavy. I struggled with it. With a big push, a groan, and “oof,” it was safely in my pickup bed.
I put the tailgate up, drove to the front yard by the driveway, and unloaded it by the side of the highway, making sure I kept it out of the traveled portion. Annie wrote on a piece of paper, “Free, electric dryer; we think it works,” and she taped the note to the dryer with masking tape, knowing that eventually someone would come and take it and consider it a gift.
Speaking of gifts, the above is a nutcracker that my dear friend Craig made. One day he dropped by the office to give it to me. Why me? I have no idea. We have a couple of little nutcrackers at home we use during the holidays, but that’s about it. Craig’s nutcracker is super-sized. It’s huge. Heavy too. One raises the bar, puts a nut on the bolt, then brings the bar down again, and the nut is cracked. Effortlessly. Craig thought I would like it.
He was wrong.
I don’t need a nutcracker so heavy that one could kill a triceratops with it with one swing. I don’t need a nutcracker as heavy as a brick. Two bricks, maybe. In fact, I don’t need a nutcracker at all.
It turns out Craig gifted this nutcracker to one of his friends years ago, but the friend had recently died, and the guy’s wife made Craig take the nutcracker back.
I had visions of moving this nutcracker around for the rest of my life, tripping over it, and cursing it for years, all because I didn’t have the courage to tell Craig that while I appreciated the sentiment, I didn’t want his nutcracker. All because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
His “gift” wasn’t a gift at all; it was a burden.
If someone left it by the side of the highway with a sign that said “Free Nutcracker; we KNOW it works,” I wouldn’t have even slowed down.
Sadly, I imagined that in the future, Annie would be taking the nutcracker back to Craig when I died and that it would be just the next step of an eternal cycle of wives having to get rid of this damn nutcracker when their husbands died!
Or husbands, when their wives died, whatever. Or single people, or friends with benefits, whatever, I don’t care!
I’d been gifted the NUTCRACKER FROM HELL!!!
Fortunately, a couple of weeks later, a guy at work saw it and said, “what a cool nutcracker!”
The nutcracker has a new home for now. But that guy isn’t going to live forever…
But back to the dryer. Again.
Monday afternoon, I arrived home to find a big man in his 30s in the driveway, looking at the dryer. I pulled in and went to talk with him. He was driving a gray minivan.
“This free?” he asked.
“It’s all yours,” I said.
“I was up at Menards in Altoona the other day, and the cheapest model new is $800, and we can’t afford that.”
“Whew…that’s a lot,” I said.
“It really free?”
“I’ll help you load it.”
He opened up the back of the minivan, and it had lots of stuff in it, and I knew that wasn’t going to work.
“Let me back up my truck, and we can load it in there,” I said.
“You sure?” he said.
“Easier that way. Where do you live?”
“Just in town here,” he said, pointing a mile up the road to Bussey.
I pulled my truck around, backed up to the drier, got out to go around back to the drier, and lowered the tailgate.
“I can load it myself,” he said.
“No, let me help.”
Before I could get any closer, he picked the dryer up like a toy and set it into the pickup's bed. Boom. Just. Like. That.
I followed him to town; his wife was sitting on their porch, watching us pull up.
She stood up when she saw what I had in the back of the truck.
I shut off the truck, got out, and went around to drop the tailgate. Ka-thunk. He was there waiting for me. He reached out to shake my hand and said, ”thank you, thank you, thank you.” His big hand shook mine gently, almost lovingly, his palm and fingers like soft little leathery pillows. There were tears in his eyes.
I looked toward his wife on the porch, and she looked at him as proud as if he were bringing home a prize buck that could feed their family for months.
He grabbed the drier off the truck and carried it away gently, like it was a baby, up the stairs of the porch and into the house.
“He’s strong like that, his wife said.
As I was driving away, and just before she followed him into the house, she turned, smiled at me, gave a little wave, and mouthed the words, “thank you.”
Here I’d like to encourage you to subscribe (paid if you can) to my friend Mary Swander’s “Mary Swander’s Buggy Land” substack and listen to her excellent podcast “AgArts from Horse and Buggy Land.”
Every morning I get up between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m to work for a while, and then about 5:00 a.m. I go for an hour’s healing walk at nearby Cedar Bluffs Natural Area in Mahaska County. I’ve been listening to “AgArts from Horse and Buggy Land" for the past couple of weeks” while I walk. Wednesday morning, I laughed out loud (probably scaring lots of critters in the timber) while listening to the end of the story of “Bear,” the dog in the segment “Lost and Found Dogs.”
Mary is a brilliant storyteller. A precious gift to us all.
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Here are the members of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, in alphabetical order. Please subscribe to their work, and pay if you can.
Laura Belin: Iowa Politics with Laura Belin
Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury
Dave Busiek: Dave Busiek on Media
Art Cullen: Art Cullen’s Notebook
Suzanna de Baca Dispatches from the Heartland
Debra Engle: A Whole New World
Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck
Beth Hoffman: In the Dirt
Dana James: New Black Iowa
Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture
Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger
Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land
Ed Tibbetts: Along the Mississippi
Enjoyed this one, Bob. Lovely image at the end. I had a therapist once who encouraged me to think of shaming and guilt as "gifts" that I could refuse. It's an ingenious way of disarming a comment or passive aggressive suggestion. Instead of hearing hatred or judgment, which then becomes my own burden of anger, I can simply think of such remarks as harmless gifts that I can refuse. "No thank you -- you keep it." Obviously that doesn't always work, and there are occasions when hatred or judgment poses a real danger that needs to be resisted head-on. But for those little snipes from family, which aren't always worth a counterassault but can turn into real baggage if left unaddressed, it's gold.
Sorry r Bob. You had mentioned in a piece about a friend that had many walnut trees but didn't have a way to utilize the harvest. I failed to share that it was for him. I didn't share enough details, sorry.