giving back

this is the ladder that we got on freecycle.org. i joined the freecycle group for our area over the summer, and almost immediately found someone nearby who was giving away a 15' extending ladder. s and i walked over to the kind lady's house, carried it back home (insert slapstick joke here), and locked it to the drainpipe. amazingly, in the month or so that it lived outside our flat, no one thought to climb up the ladder and break in. whew!

we used the ladder to weatherproof the windows. we had intended to clean out the gutters as well, but it's really spooky up there! i know it doesn't look very high up, but you try balancing on the ladder while applying waterproof stain to the wooden frame (carefully avoiding the glass) using your left hand. we completed our window task and decided that that was enough.

as we had arranged with the kind lady who gave us the ladder, we passed it along to a deserving charity once we were finished with it. score one for the neighborhood!

s and i are not the "greenest" couple but i like to think that we are giving something back, if not fully reducing our footprint on the planet. i was happy to find a nice neighbor who would give us her ladder; equally, i was happy that it could go to a different home when we no longer needed it.

so in the spirit of giving back, or maybe more accurately, giving away... i took a load of old clothes and shoes to the local collection point for a cerebral palsy charity this afternoon. and then talked to my mom and sister in california, who had completed another monumental task: they held a huge yard sale yesterday (including many of my old things). it's nice that what is junk to one person is a treasure to someone else. right now, i feel like i have been given a gift simply by having all this stuff out of my life and into other people's. i hope they enjoy it while it lasts, and pass it on to someone else when they're done with it. and the cycle goes on...