But, it's Monday and that seems like such a negative way to start the week, so instead I'll tell you about what happened here yesterday.
Yesterday was a cloudy threatening-to-but-never-really-did-rain Sunday so Buzz decided to run to town to rent a carpet cleaner to steam clean our basement carpet which recently took a brutal beating as a direct result of too much 'shine and not enough common sense. Anyway...so I was sitting at my computer, face unwashed, hair all astray, stains from breakfast smeared across my white tee-shirt when the doorbell rang.
Now, I don't know what happens in your house when the doorbell rings, but here in the OBB a ringing doorbell results in the following dialogue from Snickers and Gidget:
THE DOORBELLLLLLLLL! THE DOORBELLLLLL! SOMEONE IS RINGING THE DOORBELLLLL! PEOPLE!!!! PEOPLE!!!! PAY ATTENTION!!!! INTRUDERS ON OUR PORCH!!!!! THEY ARE RINGING THE DOORBELL!!!!!! ANSWER THE DOOR!!!!! THERE ARE PEOPLE HERE!!!! HERE!!! RIGHT HERE!!!!! AT THE DOOR!!!! RINGING THE BELL!!!!!
All said at the top of their very barky lungs. You'd think they were killer watch dogs instead of two lazy ass pooches who spend their day rotating from one bed to the next.
Once I finally wrangled the beasts back into the kitchen I opened the door to a bright eyed and shiney faced young lady and her boyfriend. Now you know we've had people die in our house (you can read all about Frieda here), but this young gal...she was BORN in our house!
She and her boyfriend were vacationing from Nova Scotia and were driving past our house when she convinced him to pull in and knock on our door. She said to him "Hey, it's PEI, of COURSE if someone's home they'll let us in." And she was right. It didn't matter that I looked like the wreck of the Hesperas, of course I let her in.
She was so excited to tour the house, reliving flashbacks from her childhood - like the time her mom got locked out in the middle of the night so climbed the roof of our porch and knocked on her sister's bedroom window in order to be let in. Or, the time she smashed a porcelain baby-doll by accident and her grandmother sat her on our kitchen counter and comforted her with raw cookie dough. Or, the fact that what is my office used to be her bedroom and in our bedroom was where she and her two sisters would climb into their parents bed to watch the Care Bears.
She was surprised to see hardwood floors in our living room - when it was her living room it was covered in wall-to-wall carpet. When she was having a bad day she used to play hide-out in the crawl space under our staircase. She used to climb in our apple trees and the one tree that we thought was a pear tree is actually a hybrid of some sort with pears growing on one side and apples on the other...at least that's what she recollected.
It was nice to see someone so excited to visit their childhood home. It was her parents that bought our house and restored it after years of neglect and abandonment. They put in the basement, added the mud room, installed the wrap-around porch. They renovated every square inch of the place. They started before she was born and finished when she was about five...just before they sold it and moved away.
We will always have great memories of our time in this house - the first house we owned together, the first place we've knowingly lived with a ghost, the house where we were married. But it was nice to see the light in someone else's eye who lived her life here too. Only on PEI would a perfect stranger knock on your door like that.
