Saturday, January 01, 2011

A Christmas Miracle






























This afternoon Tom was driving home from Petaluma in the rain. Suddenly the window on the passenger side exploded! It shattered into a million tiny bits.

When he got home, we cleaned the glass up as best we could. But it was still raining. There was no repair place open on New Year's Day. There would be no repair place open tomorrow, Sunday, either. And meanwhile there was nowhere to park our car out of the rain.

We didn't want to duct tape plastic to the bright red paint on our precious one-year-old car which we love with all our hearts.

We had an idea. What if we cleaned out the basement? Would it fit through the doors? We measured. Two inches to spare.

You can't imagine what our basement is like and this is where the word miracle figures in. For one thing, we had a 2 ft. stack of 3/4 inch 4' x 8' plywood sitting in the middle of the floor. We never considered moving it. It had become a permanent fixture.

There was nowhere to move the plywood! We moved it. Some we leaned against the fence outside, some we stowed under the house, some we balanced on buckets and scrap wood behind the dryer. Some there was just nowhere left to put–so it stayed. We flattened the mirrors against the sides of the car and inched into the garage. It wasn't going to work. Still a foot and a half to go.

Why not just drive the right front wheel up on top of the remaining plywood? We did. It was a Christmas Miracle. There was room at the inn.